Recently Written- Bento 4 Delayed? June 26, 2010
- How To – Template Sharing Part Two February 14, 2010
- Bento 3.0.3 Update Is A Hit! February 3, 2010
- Bento As A Motivational tool January 24, 2010
- An Update About The Bento Database Manager / Digestive January 17, 2010
- PDF Archive Option! January 15, 2010
- How To – Template Sharing Part One January 14, 2010
- Template Exchange Problems! January 11, 2010
- Bento 3.0.2: First Crash December 21, 2009
- Strange Bug. Anyone? December 19, 2009
- Free Bento 3.02 Update Released December 10, 2009
- Saving Space On Forms November 17, 2009
- User Finds Bento 3 Easter Egg November 17, 2009
- Bento 3 Crash Report: November 09 November 17, 2009
- Lame Bento 3 Free Holiday Pack November 17, 2009
Apr
1
Related Records Lists
Filed Under Bento Basics, Tutorials
One of the areas which seems to cause the most confusion for Bento users is that of Related Records Lists. I am therefore delighted to say that I have written a guide to them which will hopefully explain what they can do, when they should be used, and how they are used.
The guide was meant to be fairly comprehensive but also fairly concise but the number of screenshots involved in making it a good visual guide meant that it quickly evolved into a fairly lengthy document so it will initially be released as a PDF and I will try to break it up into a series of actual articles over the next few days.
Comments and suggestions are, as ever, most welcome.
Download the Related Records Lists Guide.
Comments
23 Responses to “Related Records Lists”
Leave a Reply
Is there a way to have the second library automatically add items from the first library? For example, in the PDF there is a library of tracks. Is it possible for the second library to make a list of artists from the first library. And then, in the record for each artist, have a related records list of tracks automatically compiled from the first library?
Hi Mike. You can kind of do this. If you create a new Library called ‘Artists’ you can then use this in both the Albums and Tracks Libraries rather than that Artist and Track Artist fields. In the Artists Library you can then add Related Records Lists from both the Albums and Tracks Libraries so that you can see which albums and tracks are associated with the artist. The only problem is that in the tracks Related Records List you will not see the actual album that the tracks belong to in a meaningful, related way.
Is there any way to perform a Find, or create a Smart Collection, based on the contents of a related records list? For instance, in the default “Projects” library there is a list of Team Members; is there any way to find all projects which have a particular team member?
Hi Nicko. There is but you actually do it from the related Library. Add a Related Records List to your Address Book Library and base it on the Projects Library and then when you go to a person in the Address Book Library you will see all of the projects they are involved in.
Thanks for providing this excellent document. You have motivated me to revisit the Related Records List. The time you have taken to prepare this high quality visual guide is greatly appreciated.
Can a related records list be equated to a “subform” in Access?
It can although they are more limited. A Related Records List allows you to view records from another library in a table layout. The records in the Related Records List have to be managed manually since there currently isn’t a way to automatically populate them via a linking field or a manually created relationship.
Hi Simon:
The tutorial is great and probably doesn’t need to be changed much for Bento 2.
Especially interesting is the chapter about using calculations. But I found out that it can’t do calculations with text fields. Actually all I wanted to do is displaying the content of a text field (using a calculation field as a workaround), to avoid having to put the (ugly) related records field onto the form. My text field (in the relating records field) had a value (content) of “13:05.12″ for example, and all it displayed was “13″ (using SUM). Since one can’t remove the summery row options, I guess it can’t work.
Or am I missing something?
Thank you.
Unfortunately text fields cannot be used in calculations and what you’re trying to do is exactly what I suggested as a new feature in the Bento forums a while ago. Sadly it’s still not possible.
The Tutorial is very good and I have learned a bit about how Bento is building relations. I haven´t known that these relations work back and forth so this is a useful discovery to me.
But it leaves me with a question.
The relations in part one of the tutorial (the album/track database) are updated automatically every time a new record is made.
But in the second part (relations to itself) they have to be updated manually by selecting cycling rides in the related records list. Perhaps I am missing something or it doesn´t work.
A second question: a smart collection seems not to update automatically when used in a related records field. Is this correct?
Regards,
A. Wolff
Lieber neuer Freund aus Leipzig. Mein Kollege Simon wird sicher sofort antworten. Wenn nicht, tue ich es am Nachmittag. Muss jetzt zur Arbeit…
Alex,
ich glaube Sie haben beide Probleme richtig erkannt. Ich werde mir die Sache später noch genauer ansehen.
Alex,
hier bin ich wieder. You do speak German, right?
Können Sie bitte Ihre zweite Frage etwas näher ausführen? Ich habe sie so verstanden:
Sie haben eine Doppelverbindung zwischen zwei Dateien hergstellt, und eine (oder beide) Datei (en) ist (sind) eine “intelligente” Kollektion, stimmt das so?
I don’t speak German so I’m not sure what Florian’s reply is so here’s my answer.
When you create a relationship in a library that references itself there is no automatic updating because you’re not updating the ‘child’ library. With the albums and tracks, tracks can be added to an album automatically because Bento can clearly see that the albums library is the parent and that the tracks library is the child so particular tracks belong to a particular library. However, in a self-referencing relationship Bento doesn’t know what the parent-child relationship is so you have to manually manage it. You would have the same problem if you entered tracks into the tracks library in the table view. Bento would not know what the parent album for these tracks is so they would not automatically be associated with an album.
Using a smart collection as a source for a related records list is not implemented brilliantly because, as you have discovered, there is no automatic updating. In Bento 1 it was not even possible to use a smart collection as a source for a related records list so things are improving, just not quite perfect yet.
Sorry about the German, Simon. I couldn’t resist after noticing Alex’s origin… but as you could see I didn’t give a detailed answer. I wanted to wait for you.
Thanks for noting that Bento 1 didn’t allow Smart Collections – I’ll add that fact to me new weekly series (going into Irish now…).
I did make one test (more to follow) and found that Bento WILL automatically remove records from a (Smart Collection-) Related Records List Field that have been removed from the Smart Collection (-source) – so technically there is SOME updating. So it’s not totally static in that situation.
Thank you both for answering my questions.
Simon has clearly pointed out that there is no automatic update in a self-related library (what a pity). As this was not mentioned in the tutorial I thought it has to be as it is described in the first lesson.
The question with the smart-collection pointed in the same direction for it would make sense i.e. for use as a PIM.
Again thank you for your help!
Best regards
A. Wolff
Alex,
bitte sehr, jederzeit!
(I better stay with English so everyone can follow)
I have the feeling we’re still not clear on this. I will explain this again in next week’s official tutorial update, because it wasn’t really mentioned in the original tutorial.
The advantage of a relational loop is that if you add a record to a Related Records Field in one Library, it IS added to the Related Records Field of the other linked Library automatically.
To use the example of the tutorial: if you add a whole list of tracks to the related records in the Album library, ALL those records in the Track library will automatically display the Album name and Artist in their respective Related Records Field.
Sorry for any confusion – I hope this is totally clear now.
Thank you for the great guidance on this site – I hope I’m getting this right.
For my purposes, I’ve got a Library of organizations that my employer donates to, including contact information, notes, etc. I also need to keep track of each donation made to an organization, which was previously entered in plaintext in a “notes” field – horrible to work with.
What I’ve done is created another library called “Donations” with fields for amount, check number, date, acknowledgment, etc. – and inserted this into the “Organizations” library as a RRL.
Doing this, if I add a new donation to the RRL from within the “Organizations” library, there’s no way to automatically label the organization this donation was given to in the “Donations” library.
But if I drag the Organizations library ONTO the Donations Library as another RRL and on that RRL it automatically populates the name of the Organization from the other library. It’s not pretty but it seems to work!
Hi David,
since you are so nice to me, let me give you some help too.
Try this: add one field to your new Donations Library: a Choice Field. Add all the names of the organizations to that field (the ones donations were given to). You can always edit that choice field later (adding organizations). Then you CAN add an organization to the RRL from within the Organizations Library, just as you wanted!
Tell me if you have more questions.
Hi
Is there a way to export a library to an excel file with its related fields from other libraries?
Hi Mo,
no, you can’t do that. Go to the Bento forum and suggest this feature to be included in a future version. Make sure tech support acknowledges your request.
If I am on the phone with someone and I want to take notes of the conversation, and link them to the contact, can I do that with a time/date stamp, and will it be a record that I can continue adding to?
Sure, Gary.
You could, for example create a library called “phone conversations” and use that library as a related records field in your contacts/address book.
Then for each conversation you create a new record: the Date Created field will automatically have the time/date stamp.
The best way, of course, is to create the new record from inside (within) the related records field, while you are viewing the contact information of the person you’re talking to.