Iron Speed Designer has a ‘virtual foreign key’ facility that allows you to instruct Iron Speed Designer to treat certain fields as if they are foreign key fields, even if they’re not explicitly declared as foreign key fields in your underlying database. As with explicitly declared foreign keys, Iron Speed Designer uses virtual foreign key relationships to create master-detail pages.
This is especially useful for database views which may not be permitted to have explicit foreign keys. Unfortunately not all databases permit you to explicitly declare foreign keys in database views, so declaring a virtual foreign key in Iron Speed Designer may be the only way to create certain page types. Even if the database does permit foreign keys for views, the particular views you are using may not have them defined.
Declare your virtual foreign keys in Iron Speed Designer before using the Application Wizard, especially for database views. Defining virtual foreign keys in Iron Speed Designer will greatly enhance the suite of pages that can be created.
Examples:
SalesRepSummaryView.EmployeeID à Employees.EmployeeID
SalesByRegionView.RegionID à .Regions.RegionID
See Step 6: Select Virtual Primary Keys and Virtual Foreign Keys for details.
Step 1: Create child tables for one-to-many relationships
Step 2: Create separate lookup tables
Step 3: Create database views to express multi-table joins and complex queries
Step 4: Explicitly declare primary keys in your database
Step 5: Explicitly declare foreign keys in your database
Step 6: Declare virtual primary keys in Iron Speed Designer
Step 7: Declare virtual foreign keys in Iron Speed Designer