Apr 88 Letters
Volume Number: 4
Issue Number: 4
Column Tag: Letters & Editorial
The Great DataBase Challenge 
By David E. Smith, Editor & Publisher
But Can It Do Columns?
For several years, I have been interested in a relational DataBase application that
keeps track of families and family members. I started out on an Apple II, using various
DataBase products, whose names now escape me, to keep track of Church membership
lists. Such an application is relational since you must track both the family
information, and the member information for each member that is linked to that
family. Since the Mac came out, I have tried various Mac products and have learned a
lot about the problem of real world processing on the Mac.
One thing I have discovered is that nearly every Macintosh DataBase is incapable
of formatting a report of families and family members in the same double column
format we use for MacTutor, with a hairline box around the page and a line down the
middle. The problem is the products cannot determine how many members are in each
family and how many families will fit in the column before moving to the top of the
next column. So I offer this DataBase challenge to any Macintosh DataBase product to
see if they can create such a report. The winning product gets a free ad in MacTutor and
a glowing editorial review. Here are my results so far.
I first tried Helix. However, I quickly became buried in icons and gave up after a
few days. Then I tried MacLion. But they went out of business before I even got started.
Next came FileMaker. Although this is a flat DataBase, I was able to accomplish the goal
by setting up the file with both the family and members of family combined into a
single record for each family. When I needed reports dealing only with members, I
used a program written in Basic to “flatten” the DataBase and extract the members
without the family information. The very good export and import functions of
Filemaker make nearly anything possible. By placing the family report in Pagemaker,
I was able to format it in columns. However, all this “pre-processing” got tiring after
a few months, so I moved on.
Next came Omni 3 Plus. However, it soon became apparent that the relational
aspect of Omni 3 had been tacked on to what was once a flat DataBase product, so that
working with multiple relations between files was very difficult and not at all obvious.
Although I was told there is a technical note for programming Omni 3 to format in
columns from a relational DataBase, the complexity of the whole thing discouraged me
and I gave up on it.
My most recent attempt has been with Borland’s Reflex Plus. As I reported in a
recent issue of MacTutor, Reflex Plus can solve the formatted double column report
requirement, at least so I thought! Reflex Plus is particularly easy and nice when it
comes to setting up multiple related files and anything can be quickly changed at any
time. I love it! Which is why I am so frustrated that it can’t format a page in double
columns correctly. Oh you can set up the necessary calculations to group the families
and members into a double column listing, but the page break option is brain damaged
and can’t figure out when to move to the top of the next page when using two
independent repeating collections. As a result of this bug, you can’t keep the family
members grouped together without a break at the bottom of each page. And because the
export function is also brain damaged, you can’t export a report with nested repeating
collections into Pagemaker and format the double columns there! So you are just stuck!
So close, yet so far! (It also lacks the ability to make the box around the page and line
down the middle and have them repeat on each page!)
That leaves dBase Mac and 4th Dimension as our next candidates. Stay tuned!
doMessage Proc Listing Missing
In the MacDraw Plotter program we published in the Feb. ’88 issue of MacTutor,