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Reference Groups

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Posted on by Mohammad Raziq Ali

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I would like to know what Reference group is all about.

I know Reference groups used for populating look ups but we still have different way to pursue it.

What is the specific use of Reference Group which makes it unique from other.

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André Arnaud de Cal... 299,149 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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RE: Reference Groups

Hi,

I think you are referring to the Form control ReferenceGroup?

This control is used to display a value from a referenced table using a foreign key relation. An example is the field Project manager on the Project form. The value displayed on the form is the name of a worker. The database field in the table contains a record id, which is a reference to the worker table.

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Ivan (Vanya) Kashperuk on at

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RE: Reference Groups

Also consider reading through the following nice white paper:

www.microsoft.com/.../details.aspx

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Mohammad Raziq Ali 2,476 on at

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RE: Reference Groups

Thanks andre......

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Mohammad Raziq Ali 2,476 on at

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RE: Reference Groups

Thanks Ivan, It's always pleasure to view your satisfied replies....

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Martin Dráb 236,297 Most Valuable Professional on at

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RE: Reference Groups

Just for reference, I also tried to explain reference groups on my blog.

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Mohammad Raziq Ali 2,476 on at

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RE: Reference Groups

Hi Martin,

One Small doubt that has to be clarified and I will demonstrate with an example.

I created two tables e.g., BaseTable & DerivedTable, the fields in BaseTable(EmpId, Name, DOB) and in Derived Table(TotalHourWorked, TotalAmountCharged).

EmpId is primary key in BaseTable, in table properties, I assign Replacement Key = PrimaryIdx (Alternate key = Yes in Index properties of BaseTable).

In DerivedTable, I created Foreign key (Primary key based) based Relation, It added the BaseTable field with same name as Table Name which of type Int64, till here, It's OK but when I dragged this field in form-> Design->Designs node, It became type of Reference Group (I am not Emphasizing on contents of Form)

My questions is, Can't I get this same feature as simple as same above in another way?

You did this same thing in your post in more simpler way by just selecting ReplacementFieldGroup.

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Martin Dráb 236,297 Most Valuable Professional on at

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RE: Reference Groups

Sorry, it's not clear to me what your problem is. You described how you created a reference group by dragging a field, which is exactly the same approach as used in my article. Then you talk about selecting ReplacementFieldGroup, but it's not clear what problem you have with doing the same with your newly created reference group.

Note that I would expect you to have the surrogate key as the primary key and EmplId as the alternate key. Having an alternate key the same as the primary one doesn't make much sense to me.

(By the way, you should use the worker table in any real implementation, instead of creating a new table with the same purpose.)

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Mohammad Raziq Ali 2,476 on at

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RE: Reference Groups

I did the same thing which you specified in the Note, surrogate key as primary key and EmplId as alternate key, ReferenceGroup Control present in Form & when you add it, you have ReplacementFieldGroup property associated with it, here we can select table field groups( AutoIndentification & manually Created Field Groups).

So, Instead of creating like this, Is there any alternate method to populate Replacement keys on Foreign key Table?

hope you got my question

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Martin Dráb 236,297 Most Valuable Professional on at

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RE: Reference Groups

What and why would you like to do differently? What problem do you want to solve by the theoretical alternate method?

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Mohammad Raziq Ali 2,476 on at

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RE: Reference Groups

You demonstrate one Example in your blog on Replacement Groups.

My Questions is, Is there any alternate method to do the same Example of yours?

It's a part of my R&D.

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