Linking To Contacts & Projects in FileMaker

DayBack includes sample tables to stand in for Contacts and Projects tables you likely already have. If your calendar events are related to contacts or projects, you can show those relationships in DayBack and jump to those related entities from the calendar.

Note that these need not be used literally for "contacts" and "projects" but can be for any two parent-entities of an event.

Setting Up Contacts & Projects

Begin by pointing the contact and project occurrences in DayBack at the tables you'd like to use in their place.

Double click on the SampleContacts_DayBack table occurrence in the calendar's relationship graph and point it at your contacts table. Change the relationship to "SampleEvents_DayBack" so it's using the primary key of your contacts table on the contact's side of the relationship. Do the same for projects.

Note that the relationship cannot be a multi-key relationship, it must relate to a single field similar to what is shown above. If you need the relationship to rely on multiple values you can add a new field to your contacts and projects tables that is set as an auto enter calculation field that concatenates those values into a single string. Make sure this field is not set to unstored as you will want it to be indexed for better performance. You could then use the FileMaker replace command to backfill calculated data into existing records. Finally to complete the other side of the relationship add a similar new field to your events table that does the same thing (concatenates the values needed in the relationship to a single string). Then create a new table occurrence for projects and contacts and utilize the newly created fields for the join in the relationship.

Note that if your events table is in a file different from the file DayBack is in, be sure to name the table occurrences here with the same names they have in the file where your events live. That's the context in which these table occurrence names will be evaluated.

Once you have the relationship graph pointed at the entities you'd like to use, open DayBack's admin settings and select the calendar you want to customize. We'll use Sample Events in this example.

Field Mapping

Navigate to the field mapping tab and scroll down until you get to the Contact and Project fields right above the "Validate your field mapping" section. Click on the Details below each field to see what's required. If you originally used DayBack with the example contact and projects tables, these fields are likely still pointed there and you'll want to update both the names of the ID fields in your events table and the "name" fields from your contacts and projects tables. Click "Validate Field Mapping" at the bottom of the screen when you're done.

Related Records

Next, click on the Related Records tab. Where field mapping told DayBack how to render your related contacts and projects, here is where you'll tell DayBack how you'd like to search for and navigate to related records. Click on the Details link below each field to learn what's required. Then click "Validate..." contacts or projects when you're done.

Example Layouts and Scripts

If you change the table that your related contact and projects are based on, you may need to update the Contact Detail and Project Detail layouts to point to your fields. Additionally, the New Event for Contact - DayBack and New Event for Project - DayBack scripts contain a hard-coded line (11) that points to the id field on the table. You'll need to update these scripts to point to the id field on your tables.