by I have a complicated question that might just wind up baffling anyone
that reads it. Here is what I seek help in doing:
I have lists with metadata about administrative features: Nations
(ADMLevel 1), Provinces (ADMLevel 2), Prefectures (ADMLevel 3), Counties
(ADMLevel 4), Townships (ADMLevel 5), etc. What I would like to do is
when I am in the entry interface creating an entry for a County, I'd
like to choose the Nation from a list, and then be given another list of
only the Provinces that are within that Nation, and then be able to
choose the appropriate Prefecture from that Province and then place the
County within that. This database has several hundred Counties, so if
when I get down to the Township level, I at least only get only the
Counties within a given Prefecture, that will make my pop-up list a lot
more manageable.
The metadata is very similar regardless of the Level of the feature -
whether a Nation, Province, etc is described, so I am thinking it can be
done with a singular file and not separate files for each feature type.
The calculation that I am thinking is something like this:
1. Find all the records where the ADMLevel = 1 (i.e. a Nation) and the
FeataureName=the value I've chosen from the list of 5 Nations.
2. Find all the ADMLevel 2 features (i.e. Provinces) that fall within
that ADMLevel 1 feature.
3. Then take the FeatureName field of all those ADMLevel 2 features
(i.e. Provinces) and put the values into a value list.
4. Select the value for that Province and then similary constrain the
search to only the Prefectures within that Province.
If any has even made it through this message, much less offerred some
advice, i say props to you!
Gratefully,
David N