Subject Re: Form to Form From Mervyn Bick <invalid@invalid.invalid> Date Tue, 13 Jun 2023 15:58:21 +0200 Newsgroups dbase.getting-started On 2023/06/11 17:36, Mervyn Bick wrote: > More, perhaps later otherwise tomorrow. Looking at the structure of your patient table raises a few issues. Using a logical datatype for the SEX field instead of the more usual character field with a width of 1 reminds me of the story about the job applicant filling in an application form.  The entry for SEX was 'YES'. ACTIVE is a reserved word in SQL.  Using it as a field name is permitted but it does require special handling if you ever need to use SQL to interrogate your tables.  You may feel now that this will never happen but 'never' is a long time.  Use, say, ACTIVE_PAT instead. There is a school of thought that holds that one should never save the same information in more than one place.  The information in your patient table should be information that seldom changes such as address or phone number.  The date of the initial appointment will never change so that could well be saved but the dates of the previous and next appointments should be fetched from the appointments file when your edit form opens. Instead of having a BALANCE field in the patient table to show if payments are outstanding interrogate the billing table when the form opens.  That way there is no possibility of an error. Instead of using a logical datatype for the BILL_TO field save the PAT_NO of the responsible person.  If the same number is saved in PAT_NO and BILL_TO it means the patient gets the bill.  If the numbers are not the same you can show who gets the bill. You have used character fields with a width of 20 for the INSnNOTES fields.  Is this enough?  Memo fields may be a better choice.  You are not restricted to one memo field per table. I added code to the edit form to display the patient's age and when testing this I found that one character was enough to find a patient's name EXCEPT in the case of Tom Riddle.   RI and Enter worked. R and Enter didn't.  On the other hand G and Enter works perfectly for Hermoine Granger.  Needless to say, this has occasioned much head scratching.  It's got to the stage where I can't see the wood for the trees. :-(  Tomorrow is another day. Mervyn.