Zero to Awesome - Using Data Objects
FileMaker solutions can get pretty messy - fast! In fact, if you don't take the time to document your solution, you quickly end up with a Frankenstein. Besides documentation, there's one thing you can do to make your solution easier to understand (from a developer's perspective) - limit the number of table occurrences within the relationship graph.
You may already have many more table occurrences than you actually need to accomplish what you're getting done now. The tactic is to use Data Objects. A data object is simply the process of dedicating a TOG (table occurrence group) to rendering the data object.
For much of the rest of your solution, in which a lot of application logic lies within scripts, you can simply reference this data object instead of creating additional table occurrences for the sake of functionality. This will keep your solution cleaner, more efficient and sometimes faster!