Often enough you will be asking the sort of question – Show me all the patients who have been invoiced in a particular time period.

Or, check the history file and show me all my contacts who attended a particular seminar in the last 2 years.

Both these questions relate to 2 files connected through a relationship.

This system is able to ask questions on only one file at a time, however, this function allows these type of questions to be answered.

In principle one can make selections on one file and store the related unique keys of another file in a relevant extract file.

Firstly you will be presented the following dialogue:

When you click the Add button you will be presented with a dialog where you will have to specify the linkage between the two files.

The fields of the current file are shown on the left.

Now select a Link File by clicking the Choose Link File button.

This will now populate the second list box in the First Linkage specs with the indices of the file ACCTFIL and prepares the first list box of the second linkage with all the fields of ACCTFIL.

Now select the field in PATFIL that relates to an index in ACCTFIL, give the linkage a name and view the linkage relationship generated in the field labelled Link1.

One can build a double linkage in the same way, where any field indexed or non-indexed in the “from file” can connect to an index in the “to file”

After Selecting the relevant linkage you will be asked for the name of an extract file that will be stored against the ACCTFIL.

The display will now switch to ACCTFIL and show the records selected.

This is a display of records that were stored in the just created extract file that has been inserted into the extract catalogue for the ACCTFIL file.