Forum Discussion

LauraMcFeely's avatar
LauraMcFeely
Qrew Cadet
6 years ago

Displaying most recent and next upcoming record

Hello! My app is used to track my team's relationships with teachers, who use our cases as teaching material in their classrooms. My team is interested in seeing how a teacher's experience using ca...
Laura_Thacker's avatar
Laura_Thacker
Qrew Commander
6 years ago
I think you could simplify this by doing the following:

1.  Your first "summary" field to get your Record ID# to give you the last-Case date that was entered before the Training Advice was given would be setup as follows:

Summarize the MAXIMUM [Record ID#] when [Date of Case] is before the date in the field [Date of Training Advice]

Use this summary-field value as the formula-value in your reverse-relationship to identify the information from the last-case entry before training.

2.  Your second Summary field to get your Record ID# to give you the first-Case date after the training advice was given would be setup as follows:

Summarize the MINIMUM [Record ID#] when [Date of Case] is after the date in the field [Date of Training Advice]

Use this summary-field value as the formula-value in your reverse-relationship to identify the information from the first-case AFTER training advice.

Remember that ALL your Cases must be connected to the Training Advice Record.  Your workflow description suggested that Cases would be entered before Training Advice was given; and so I wonder what process you have for ensuring that existing Cases are assigned to a new Training Advice entry.

If you pull your summary fields as Record ID#s rather than "dates" you may find this yields more accurate results.

Did you know about the new Summary Combined Text Field?  This has solved a lot of need for reverse relationships.  You can summarize text data values (unique ones) from child-record data without having to physically build the reverse relationship itself.  You will still need the summary fields to determine the Record ID#s to pull the data from; but you do not necessarily need the whole relationship connection.  You often then have to convert the summary-combined-text-fields into Formula-Text fields for readability though.

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Laura Thacker (IDS)
laura@intelligentdbs.com
(626) 771 0454
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LauraMcFeely's avatar
LauraMcFeely
Qrew Cadet
6 years ago
Thanks so much, Laura!

I like your idea to simplify, but I think your way would rely on cases always being entered chronologically in terms of when they happened, and therefore Record IDs always being in order from smallest (earliest date) to largest (latest date). Unfortunately, we can't rely on that -- we sometimes find out about cases months after they happened, which is why I built it on Date rather than Record ID#. 

I'm not seeing how your summary field for the first case after receiving advice is different from mine, other than being based on Record ID#. For some reason, summarizing by the minimum [Date of Case] when [Date of Case] is after the date in the field [Date of Teaching Advice] is not working. 

I did not know about the new Summary Combined Text Field! That's very interesting, and could be really helpful. I'll play around with it and see how I can use it.  

Thanks again!