How Combining Notes Fields Works
To understand "Combine Notes Fields", think of hierarchical information in two ways:
1) Response Documents and
2) Multi-Value text lists.
A common example is a Customer Main document with response documents containing product sales information. Another approach to this is to put one field on the parent document with a multi-value list containing product sales information.
Combining Notes Fields converts many forms into one form, based on a key.
Typical Uses
1. Put a current list of the classes of products purchased by a customer in the main customer record.
2. This feature works well to create a "snapshot" of a customer product sales situation.
3. In combination with the Creating Doclinks to Data feature, users can have one doclink to look at customer product sales situation from other databases, such as a call report database.
4. Find a set of forms listing courses attended in a course tracking database and attach that list to a personnel record as a multi-value text field.
Points to Remember
1. Sentinel needs a key to match the source fields to the destination form.
2. The source can be either main documents or response documents.
3. If the source contains response documents, select "No response hierarchy" so that the view is "Flat".
Sample Uses
1. Use a selection formula to sub-select certain records from the source. For example, you might only pick products from the "Sporting Goods" product line and put that into a single multi-value field in the destination Notes database. The selection formula looks like: "Select form = "Products" & ProductLine = "Sporting Goods".
Tips and Techniques
1. If you want to put more than one product line into the destination, copy and paste the "Sporting Goods" Task form, and change "Sporting Goods" to "Household Wares". This will create a second multi-value list field on the destination.
2. When designing a form to hold the results of the Combine Notes Fields task, Use New Line as a separator for multi-value lists. Semicolons are hard to read.
3. Use tables to place multi-value lists side-by-side on a destination Notes database form. This makes multi-value lists more readable.