tenbob
New Member
Despite doing a lot of reading and experiments, I'm still having trouble understanding the basic structure and design philosophy of Fabrik. Can anyone help with a few hints, please?
My application is a database of clubs which can be represented in a single flat database table. Fortunately there is no need to link to any other tables at this stage. I started out by defining my list, which in turn creates a form and a group. I then added all the elements I needed. So far, so good.
In the application users will be working with different groups of elements at various times. So I want to define several different forms, each containing a subset of the elements. And several different lists to use as indexes into the relevant records.
So I started to create new lists all of which pointed to the original database table. Each time I created a new list it created a new form and a new group of the same name. I was surprised to find that it also duplicated all the elements and put them into the new group. So I ended up with a huge list of elements. I thought this was going to be a nightmare to manage, but I discovered that the duplicated elements all had their properties referenced back to the original ones.
I am now starting to prune the unwanted elements from each group so the lists and forms contain only the elements that are actually needed.
I can't help thinking I'm missing something or there must be an easier way. Deciding which fields to display in a list or form is a very common requirement, but I seem to be floundering. Is this the "right" approach? I can't find much help in the wiki.
My application is a database of clubs which can be represented in a single flat database table. Fortunately there is no need to link to any other tables at this stage. I started out by defining my list, which in turn creates a form and a group. I then added all the elements I needed. So far, so good.
In the application users will be working with different groups of elements at various times. So I want to define several different forms, each containing a subset of the elements. And several different lists to use as indexes into the relevant records.
So I started to create new lists all of which pointed to the original database table. Each time I created a new list it created a new form and a new group of the same name. I was surprised to find that it also duplicated all the elements and put them into the new group. So I ended up with a huge list of elements. I thought this was going to be a nightmare to manage, but I discovered that the duplicated elements all had their properties referenced back to the original ones.
I am now starting to prune the unwanted elements from each group so the lists and forms contain only the elements that are actually needed.
I can't help thinking I'm missing something or there must be an easier way. Deciding which fields to display in a list or form is a very common requirement, but I seem to be floundering. Is this the "right" approach? I can't find much help in the wiki.
