If you have a parent with three fields, and a child with two fields, and the parent has four children, you should see in the ASCII file, a pattern like this, for that parent:

A B C D E
A B C F G
A B C H I
A B C J K

If the next record has three children, it would be followed by:

L M N O P
L M N Q R
L M N S T

Here the letters represent different field values. The repetition of the parent field values, tells Sesame that the line in the ASCII file is intended to fill out a child of that parent.

So, look through your ASCII file and look for a failure in that repetition at the point where you are seeing an erroneous parent being created.

What Mark is saying, for everyone that does not understand Cow-speak, is that all the fields on the parent form have to match in order for Sesame to know that the parent record is the same and to populate it's children. If one field is even slightly different, such as an extra space, then Sesame does not see the records as being the same.

-Ray

Steve,

Just out of curiosity, what was the problem?

-Ray

Quote:

I just found a stray subform record in one of my apps.

This is the process I used:
1) Make a temporary backup copy of your app.
2) Open that temporary copy.
3) Retreive all of the main form (parent) records.
4) After double checking that you are looking at the temporary copy, perform a Mass Delete of all the parent records.
5) Open the subform as standalone in Search/Update mode, and press F10 to see if there are any subform records. If there are, they are orphans, because they should have been removed when the parent records were deleted.

Now, this brings up an issue. How did my app get an orphan subrecord? I am using Natural linking. (I understand how it could happen with Relational linking if my programming failed to fill the key field or some such problem.)

I wonder if this would happen if I created a subrecord, but failed to save the main record?

Ray, it seems that I remember you, or someone at Lantica, explaining something similar to this. Am I correct here?

Thanks Ray.

Lets not forget about the records that become 'unlinked' due to corruption...or should I say, if a meteor shower causes a naturally linked record to lose its parent.

Can we recreate the link? Can we 'delete' the corrupt link?

I'm finding that just 1 corrupt link can cause major issues.

Steve