Dabble DB master-detail and duplicate records handling.

In this post I am gonna cover how Dabble DB master-detail works and how to handle duplicate records.

Having built a simple invoice application I created two entries.Invoice (master) where I will save the header:


And Item (detail) for storage of invoice items:


This is how invoice editing looks like:


Pay attention to the type of difficulties I as the user faced (the peculiarities of Dabble DB master-detail implementation):

• Dabble DB doesn’t reflect the detail in the grid form with column names;


• I couldnt calculate and display the Total column of Items on the same screen;


• Failed to find an option to calculate invoice grand Total on this very screen;


• Couldnt edit invoice Item on this screen, cause the system redirects me to another page.

Let’s take a look now which means are there for search of the duplicates. Dabble DB has no built in tools for duplicates search. As I’ve looked through Dabble DB forum, the support team offers to do following things:

"The easiest thing is probably to group the entries by a column that should be unique. Any unique entry should be a group of one, while duplicates will be grouped together. You can then use the Actions menu to merge all groups, producing only unique entries."

So, let’s follow the advice and check what happens while doing this:


This is what I’ve got as I pressed Go:


When testing the function the system takes first master record and all details from deleted master records are transferred to it.

The good news is the system merges detail records to the new master.

But! The user can’t control which master to pick as a base and define the right field combination for resulting master record.