Matt Petrowsky has done it again. He released a free one hour video on Saturday that walks you through a particularly confusing aspect of relationship creation in Filemaker 7. The video article is called Graph Rules – Four rules to remember and is available at the ISO FileMaker Magazine site.
I recommend this video for anyone who is grappling with how the relationships diagram works. If you are knowledgeable about FileMaker, you probably will get more out of this than if you are a newcomer because you have habits to break. But he’s managed to make it work for either audience by covering basic principles in the first part and then tackling a tricky *rule* later on.
Matt includes a free download with before and after file examples so you can practice and experiment with the first and doublecheck yourself with the second.
His four rules are a little hokey but effective:
1. There shalt not be any circular references. Thou must have a start and an end between table occurrences.
2. Thou shalt have as many table occurrences as needed. The key to the graph is organization.
3. From wherest thou is, if thine eyes cannot see what thouest desire, another TO is what ye may aspire.
4. Along thy relationship chain, any given TO knows of all others but only through his brother.
Right now, if you plan to do even moderately sophisticated development with FileMaker 7, you probably need all the help and repetition you can get. Take the hour. I followed along while lying on my couch with my Powerbook.