Have read very quickly through the relational database docs and don’t see how to take ‘old’ code with a formulafill lookup and convert it to the new relational database. Any suggestions would be most welcome.
You don’t convert; you start from scratch. The old code will also work perfectly well, but there are some advantages to the new way of doing things, and setting up the new way is fairly quick, though as usual you’ll have a learning curve to deal with and new mistakes to make and recover from. The forum has a lot of information on that from the experience of those who’ve already done it.
Made two new small test databases and set up the relationship without any hitches. Found the “Join” command and that also worked very nicely.
Tried to do the same with two existing databases and it fails at the “test keys” button. The two key fields have the same field names and same field types: they’re both filled with item numbers. However the item numbers in the two databases are not identical. Does that matter and if so, what is the workaround?
Still mystified, but after further playing with my test databases I can say that having different amounts of data in the key field makes no difference, nor does having different numbers of fields in the two databases. So I’m stuck on what is causing the relationship between the key fields in the existing databases not to work. I’ll experiment more tomorrow. Yep, ye olde learning curve.
I can say even at this early point that once I get this working, it will be a big improvement over the hassles of formulafill lookups. Nice!
Don’t know if this qualifies as a bug–more like my carelessness–but I’ll report it anyway for what it’s worth. My existing database had a few fields with no field names. I’ll have to check but I believe that’s the result of the database being imported from a source which had some unnamed fields. It’s worked fine for years so I haven’t worried about it. Anyway, once I named the blank fields, the key field relationship started working correctly. I would say the new join took about 10 seconds vs minutes for the old lookup. Around 25,000 records. Greased lightning, baby–I am psyched! Thanks, Jim. Great work.