How do I record submissions of works to venues

[James Foster]

sorry, I’m not sure how to ask this question.

I have a form with data about my writings (date, genre, word count, etc.) a form with data about publishers (name, ranking, target audience, etc.). I want to create a form that records which peices I have submitted to which publishers, with data on when I submitted, when they rejected, etc. Sounds like a join of the two forms with extra fields for each entry. But I don’t see how to do that. Is there a more obvious solution than join? Can anyone point me to some examples of join? (the documentation is very sparse)

Thanks

[James Foster]

I suspect that question isn’t about join, but about subsets of cross products. I want my “submissions” form to have entries that are lines from the cross product of the “writings” and “publishers” forms with fields for “date of submissions” and such. Sorry to use the jargon. my background is in mathematics and I have (too much) formal CS training in databases and such.

[Brendan]

Hi James,

The Join Link Type is designed to just join two forms together with a simple matching field from each form. There’s no function for adding additional fields to the join.

One thing you could think about trying is a Table field. It looks and acts just like a Link to Form table in a sense, but it keeps its own copy of the record data. The benefit of a Table field is you can link it to another form, but only in the sense that you could copy records from the other form. And only for those fields with matching names. Plus you can add your own additional fields to the Table which you can fill in with whatever information you like.

I know some people have created an intermediate form and add extra fields to that and then link Form A -> Form B -> Form C, where Form B is kind of like a join table. But it requires you to navigate into 2 levels to get to the target form. So maybe not optimal.

Table fields might be something you’d be interested in trying. If you were ever familiar with Bento, they’re essentially like Bento’s Simple List fields.

The issue with the regular Link to Form fields is they’re true relationships. If you make a change on one form, that change will show up on the records you’ve linked to. If that’s what you want then great. But if you want to be able to link to a record in another form and then be able to change that data without it affecting the source form, then a Table field is the right tool.

Thanks,

Brendan

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