Hi John,

Is it possible to display how many appTypes a client has had?

i want to show on my clients screen a table or even just fields with:

Haircuts 6
Wax 2
Other 2

Total Appointments (For this client) 10

Etc...

Sure it can be done, just not sure how????

Many Thanks

Roy

Hi Roy,

FileMaker generally wants to do this as a sub summary report. You'd add a new field to the appointments table called something like "ApptCountSum" that would be a summary field which is a count of the prime ID in the appointments table.

Then you'd make a subsummary report which summarized by Type: placing this field in a subsummary part would count the number of appointments of that type, placing the field in a trailing grand summary part would count the number total number of appointments.

Reports like this are very flexible because they are based on the found set of appointments and can thus break out the appointment types for one customer, for one type of customer, or for one month, depending on your found set.

If you've never made one of these before, FileMaker has a wizard to walk you through this: create a new layout and select "Columnar List / Report" to get started.

Hope that helps.

Hi John,

Thanks for the reply - I thought that might be the only way, I just wanted to display the info while on the client screen without having to run a report as such and wondered if it was possible.

Anyway many thanks for answering my question.

Regards,

Roy

It is certainly possible to do it without a report, it is just trickier. And, for what its worth, you can make the report really small so it feel like a popup window.

But, here is a quick sketch of two approaches that don't use reports:

More Relationships / Fewer Calcs....

Create a calc in the Contact's table for the name of each appointment type you'd like to count; these calc would just have the text "personal" for personal appointments. Next, create one new relationship for each appointment type between contacts and appointments: the relationship would be based on the contact's ID and a link between this new "personal" field in contacts and the appointment type. This you'll have one relationship for each type showing only records of that type for that contact. Now create one calculation field for each relationship, counting the Appointment ID. Something like "Count ( AppointmentsPersonal::ApptID_kprime)".

Fewer Relationships / More Calcs...

Create one new calc in the Appointments table for each appointment type. These calcs would return a 1 if the appointment was of a given type, something like "If ( ApptType_kf = "personal" ; 1 )". Then create an equal number of calcs in the Contacts table the count these fields. In this approach you use the same relationship for all the counting, you just count a different field in each case. If my calc field in Appointments was called "ApptIsPersonal" my calc in Contacts would look like: "Sum ( ContactActivitySimple::ApptIsPersonal )" and I'd need one of these for each appointment type I wanted to count.