Creating a pricelist 1

[gusperry]

I'm working on setting up a corporate software that I would like to include a calculator for our pricing guide. This pricing guide will have atleast 3 dimensions (maybe 4). EX:

What Material, How Thick, How tall, Painted/Unpainted(yes/no).

This pricing guide breaks down in this order:
material, thickness, paint, height... from that information, you can get a final price on an indevidual product.

I'm wondering if there is a function for using that many dimensions to call a single number that has no mathmatic properties (ie. =((thickness)x(height))/(painted), and does anyone have any thought as to how to layout a table(s) of this nature.

 

[kathryn]

I'm sorry, I'm not sure I understand your question. It sounds like maybe what you want to do is to find a cost from a table given three or four values.

for example:

Material Thickness Height Painted Cost
xyz 3 4 Y 3.75
xyz 3 5 Y 3.85
abc 2 4 Y 6.00
abc 2 6 N 5.00

Do you want to be able to input the values in the first four columns and return the cost? Or are you saying that there is somekind of definable (is that a word) relationship between some of the characteristics and the cost?

 

[gusperry]

thanks kathryn, yes, I am trying to return a value based on a combination of these parameters.

Somevalue = function("Aluminum", 0.500, 48, "Yes&quot

if that helps clearify my project, I would love it if you or anyone has any suggestions on how to layout a table.
Possibly like this?:

height | unpainted | painted
2" | 6.00 | 8.00
4" | 7.50 | 9.50
6" | 10.00 | 12.00

but first I have to specify what material, and then, how thick it is: ex. gatorfoam, 1" or gatorfoam, 1½" before I even get to that table above.

maybe I should look at the differenet thickness' as different materials all together and use their name
(GF15 = Gatorfoam 1.5&quot as the name of the table to cal to for prices. you can see there are lot of things I could do. If anyone thinks they know what I should do, I'm all ears.

thanks again.

 

[kathryn]

OK, here's my two cemts.

I would set up a number of tables:

tblMaterials
------------
MaterialID (autonumber PK)
MaterialName
etc.


tblHeight
------------
HeightID (autonumber PK)
HeightValue

tblThickness
------------
ThicknessID (autonumber PK)
Thickness

tblCosts
--------
CostID (autonumber PK)
MaterialID (Lookup to tblMaterial FK)
HeightID (Lookup to tblHeight FK)
ThicknessID (Lookup to tblThickness FK)
Painted (yes/no datatype)
Cost

You could actually have one table, tblDimension, which contains all the values from Thickness and Height, and then have the two fields in tblCosts both use the same table as a lookup.

Using this method cuts down on data entry errors. Make sure that you set the LimitToList property for the lookup columns in tblCosts to Yes. Then you can only ch oose a Material, Height or Thickness that has been predefined.

Hope that helps.

 

[gusperry]

thats more than 2 cents, thanks you kindly.

 

[kathryn]

Yes, but I'm worth it.