The sample database is a report environment for a car brokerage application. Below is the figure of the sample database followed by descriptions of the different items.
Note: You can see an interactive view of the databases by pressing F7. (You can also display it by choosing About Foxfire! from the Help menu in Request Manager and then clicking “Demo File Relationships”.)
Foxfire! Sample Database
The car broker buys cars from several sources: private individuals, dealers, auctions, and so on. The broker repairs and refurbishes the cars as necessary and then resells them for (hopefully) a profit. From time to time, the supplier and customer may be the same person or agency.
In preparing cars for resale, the broker may spend money on repairs, tires, upholstery, painting, detailing, and so on. Any expenses incurred by the broker must be added to the original purchase price to determine actual profit upon resale of the car. Additionally, whenever a car is sold, the broker needs to know who the salesperson was to track sales and profits for each sales person.
The Data Items in the sample database fall naturally into four groups. These four groupings are the Data Item Groups you will find in use the sample Requests and in this tutorial. The data groups are:
Inventory: Data Items related to the cars themselves such as make, model and color. This group also includes data items tracking the date purchase, date sold, days in inventory and all other Data Items that pertain to the cars and the inventory.
Expenses: The second group is Expenses. The Expenses Data Items are used to track the expenses involved in repairing and refurbishing the cars and preparing them for sale.
Dealers: The Dealers group tracks information about the dealers the brokerage does business with. This group of Data Items is a little bit tricky. Each dealer can be a supplier, a customer or both. In other words we can buy from a dealer, sell to that dealer or buy a car from a dealer and sell it back to the same dealer. The data items in the Dealers group include items for tracking Sold To information – the information we need when we are selling a car to this dealer and items for track the Purchased from information that we need when we purchase a car from this dealer. The information on who we bought or sold a particular car from is contained in the Inventory Data Items. This group of items identifies the dealer, it does not track individual transactions.
Salesman: The Salesman group tracks information about the Salesman. This includes Data Items like name, SSN, start date and others. This group does not track which cars each salesman sold, that is found in the Inventory group. This group is just the information that identifies a specific salesman.
All of the Data Items in the sample database and the sample Requests pertain to this hypothetical business.