How do I select multiple items that can only be used once? ie: Tickets on an invoice

[BriWeber]

Hello, I have the following Tables: Employees, Time, Tickets, Invoices. 

Multiple Time entries can go on one Ticket and multiple Tickets go on one Invoice. 

I would like to be able to select time entries from within the Tickets view with an Enum List. And the same for selecting the tickets into an Invoice. These items would only be used once. 

I would like the TicketID to go in the TicketID column of the Time Records and the InvoiceID to go in the Ticket Records. 

I can do this one at a time with type Ref and is part of  but how can I accomplish this as an enum list?

[Marc_Dillon]

You'd have to set up an automation (or form save action) that whenever the EnumList column is edited, it goes into all of those children and edits their Ref column. The "execute an action on a set of rows" action type will be your friend here.

As for only selecting the items once, just add a valid_if to the EnumList to only show items with no value in their Ref column.

[BriWeber]

Thank you Marc, please forgive me if this is a dumb question, can I do the second part prior to the first part? 

I have hundreds of existing rows to deal with, I can set the automation also but not sure the best course of action to add the time entries to the tickets. An enum list base type ref seems to be working to select multiple, but i can't figure out how to see them in ref rows

[Marc_Dillon]

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@BriWeber wrote:

can I do the second part prior to the first part? 

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Not as written. The valid_if I described would depend on the Ref columns to be filled in. You could write a different valid_if that would instead look at all existing EnumList values, perhaps with list subtraction. But if you plan to have those Ref values filled in, I wouldn't bother.

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@BriWeber wrote:

but i can't figure out how to see them in ref rows

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Again, you'd need those Ref column values filled in, in order to use the REF_ROWS. You can simulate a REF_ROWS VC with a FILTER VC, if you wish.

Just to be clear, these are very much non-standard ways to set up references and apps. I don't necessarily recommend pursuing these courses of action if you're not capable of building, troubleshooting, and maintaining it yourself without lots of outside help. Basically, you're working against the system.

[BriWeber]

I see what you're saying.. My goal is not to build this backwards and Well.. that would explain why I am struggling so much with this, ... If you were building this, what would you suggest?

I actually currently have an app that the Daily Tickets are  created by each employee then I have a column that marks each entry "pulled for billing" and then I add an invoice # to the invoice # column for each pulled record with the same number.    I was trying to recreate a better process for this but I'm not sure the direction. Each step listed in my original post basically reconciles each prior step.   The ticket reconciles multiple time entries onto a ticket. Multiple tickets are reconciled onto the final invoice which is billed to the customer. 

[ladiyankah]

In the invoice, click on the "Tickets" button. This will open the "Tickets" window. In the "Tickets" window, click on the "Multiple selection" button. This will allow you to select multiple items that can only be used once.