Bharat_Naik,

You are correct that I am fond of tabs and subforms but I am far, real far from an expert. I find that Tabs and subforms gives the application a form of simplicity for the end user. For example the most basic things like phone numbers that normally take up screen space for home phone, work phone, cell phone, fax etc now can all be neatly placed in one little place so the user can always quickly find the phone section of the form and click a tab to display the specific number they need. With a little effort it is easy to change the text color on the tab and the text color of the specific field element so each phone number is a separate color. This may seem very low tech but to an end user this is a valuable feature.

In the case of subforms I will explain what I have found from my experience after many hours of playing with them. I will hope that a Lantican will  respond with technical specifics or correct my wrong assumptions.

The big issue I keep hearing mentioned is how to maintain the links between the subforms. Or what has to be done to update this data regularly.

Well the short answer I can give is nothing. I have found that Sesame makes it effortless to maintain these subform links. First the natural link method does it all for you. You just enter the data in the subform save the record and low and behold every time you retrieve the record in the main form the subrecord data is retrieved at the same time.

A real neat thing  Sesame does is that when you run your search from the main form the counter shows you what record you are in and how many records it found, when you click on an element in any subform it immediately shows you how many records are in the subform and what record you are in. So a simple example is if I search my  main form for a last name of  Smith the sesame counter shows me I am in record 1 of 35. (35 different Smiths) I of course can use Tableview and see all 35 records. But if I click an element on my subform for invoices it shows me I am in record 1 of 6. Which is the 6 invoices relating to the first record  of my 35 smiths. Even cooler is now I have another subform that is displaying the line items associated with that particular invoice when I clicked in an element in that subform the counter showed me there were 19 items relating to the first of my 6 invoices for that first customer Smith. (just for the record this subform is a tableview so when I look at my screen I see the basic info of my customer and the total of all the outstanding invoices on the top. In the middle section my subform displays my invoice overall data like date, classification, status, total of that particular invoice  etc but the subform towards the bottom in tableview displays all the line item details. If I F10 to advance from the invoice subform the basic data in the main customer record remains the same (the first Smith) but the invoice data changes to the second of 6 and so does the line item detail in the lower subform advance  to the specific line items of invoice 2 of 6.

With Relational links everything is the same except we have to assign a relational key. All the relational key is  the element from the main or parent form that matches the element on the subform. Sesame even makes this really simple. When I create a subform element, 2 of the questions it asks me is Parent record Field (this is the name of the element on the main form that holds the data to match with the subform field) and Child Record field (this is the name of the element on the subform that holds the data that matches the main form) (page 149 of the user guide shows a good picture) Basically in my example above my cusnum element that is assigned using @number is matched with the Cusnum element in my subform invoices database and that brings up all  the invoices that match that number. Each separate invoice has a invnum  element that is a unique number to that specific invoice and that matches the Invnum element in the line items database subform so it brings up every line item that matches that number wich is all the line items associated with that specific invoice.  

The other big question people have asked is  how do I get my data I have now in QA to link together so subforms work. These are the steps I followed to take an existing QA database that was basically flat (all data per client in 1 record) and put them in a relationally keyed Sesame application with subforms working,

1. I took an old QA database that has all the data in 1 record and exported the Cusnumber and any basic data that  I wanted to be in the main database to a file and import this to my main database

2. I took the same database but this time I exported the Cusnumber and the invoice number and the basic invoice fields to a file and imported them into my invoice database

3. I took the same database again this time I exported the Cusnumber and invoice number and line item detail fields and imported them into my line items database.
With these 3 files imported into sesame I have all the data linked together and displaying nicely on the subforms.

From what I have read there is not any reindexing needed in sesame so I can continue to work on the application and  not have to worry about the data.

I know this explanation got long and confusing but this should give anyone that desires to use subforms the basic direction to head into. It should also let new users know that they should not fear subforms and tabs. I am able to use them and I am not a computer guru, I am just like many of us out here, just trying to find how we can best utilize Sesame for our own jobs and businesses.

I had hoped that example applications such as you describe would have been included. Sometimes it is easier to see than to read. I hope Lantica offers them for downloading sometime soon.  Some of these concepts take time to understand and visualize. A great help would be to see the obvious power Sesame has to an application with many features working. Hope someone reads and listens and reacts.

Yes.  This is probably, for me at least, what most would help me understand this concept and transition.

Q2: I have installed the 1.0.1 upgrade for Sesame, but I still continue to get small print when using the Print Command from the tree structure.  Know whats going on?

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I looked up all of your posts to see what the original printing problem was. Earlier you said that it was printing small and in the middle of the page. Is that still the case?

When you say small, how small do you mean? Is it the size of a postage stamp or a few inches tall/wide?

Mark:
It prints in the middle of the page about 2 1/2 inches wide but completely tall (9 inches). What I need is how to stretch it out sideways. 

Alec:
Yes, you are right. Actually BOBSCOTT and Bharat_Naik have helped me, especially when to use them and what type of linking for the particular case.

When I say you are right, I am referring to the countries and gems Db's. I'm sorry to say that I looked at them but I did not see them. I missed the boat and the water. Maybe those Puerto Rican cigars have more than tabacco in them, and they are small in size.

I need to experiment more with the data and applications on hand. I am trying to rush things to quickly.  I have said this before, Sesame has more than I bargained for or even expected. There is a misconception that Sesame is or was going to be QA 6.0. How wrong and far from the truth. There is a lot to learn, power to spare and lots of fun designing for a 1.0 version of a product. 

So Alec take your time and again thank you.

Quote:

I posted this about a week ago and since then have worked on this off and on but the results are still the same. Is there a bug in programing within subforms? or is there more to the process that I'm missing.

Bob I believe you had a similar problem, did you get anything to work apart from manual entry in the subform?

There are a number of fixes going in 1.0.2 for subform (especially subform-tableview) programming.