Associated fields and @AF

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Mon, Jun 27, 2005 at 12:39:54PM -0700, Christopher Yerry wrote:
>    I Know I will get lots of negative nasty notes on this but a few years
>    ago  we  dropped  all associated fields and created child tables. This
>    requires  some  extra  work in the automatic process but it has always
>    paid  off.  The  selection  is  easier,  you never have to worry about
>    someone  needing  one more "associated field" or having 900 blanks per
>    record "in case someone needs it".

Ah, yes... normalization. 

:-)

Normalization is a wonderful thing... except when it's not.  One of
filePro's nice touches is that it makes it practical to denormalize in
those situations where it's necessary -- it would be, for example, very
difficult to let people search a customer file by Name, Address, or
*any* phone number without completely reimplementing the main menu, if
you had normalized the multiple phone numbers which a customer might
have out into another file.

Using an associated field group for all the phone number fields you put
in a file makes that pretty trivial.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
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