[subego]

Let's say I have a table "Households" and a table "Peasants". Each Peasant has a Household ID that relates it to its proper household.

Let's say each Peasant has a "Status" field which is either "Active" or "Deceased", and want to build the above relationship only to relate to records where (obviously) there is a Household ID match, AND a status of "Active"

At the moment I have a global field in the Households table that's contents are the text "Active" and (within the same relationship) I relate this to the Status field in the Peasants table.

Is this the way I'm supposed to do this? In other words, is there some way of putting the constant "Active" directly into the relationship criteria without wasting an entire field on it? I'm worried that by the end I'll have each table just stuffed with these global search constants.

If this is confusing, I'll try and explain it better. I'm trying to balance being clear and long-winded.

Thanks!

[bojangles]

Nope, that’s the way you have to do it. However, it bears mentioning that global fields are by definition unstored and user-specific, so this method will fail if either

a) …you’re in a multi-user environment, or
b) …you need a bi-directional relationship.

What I generally do, in these situations, is create a calculation field—sometimes global, sometimes not, depending on my needs—that is set to return the constant value. (As an aside, there’s a great FileMaker Naming Conventions white paper on FileMaker.com ((1.9MB PDF)), which includes some really good suggestions as to how to denote your key fields—including constants.)

HTH.

[subego]

Absolutely it helps!

Thanks!