theOx26

Ok, well the first thing to remember is that a portal is more for showing multiple related records. Unless you work like Fedex, I'm going to assume you only have one truck hooked to one trailer and one driver at any given point in time. The best way to show this is to make a relationship between the tables that will be a truck number to truck number in each table. I won't into it too much but you can play with it to see more. Then with that relationship, you can have one layout based in drivers that can also have a field from trucks and a field from trailers. YOu can use a value list based on the truck numbers and another based on the trailer numbers. Your numbers are small enough that that will works pretty easily. It's up to you whether you work from driver or truck standpoint, but since both connect to a truck, I would do it from the truck standpoint and have reports that show from the other views. So basically, value lists and relations based on numbers to pull in the data make the most sense to me. If some of that isn't too clear, let me know.

Randy, You were very right to switch to tables in one file. That is always the best way to do a simple setup like this. Now, to be able to help with the best method for your system, we'll need a little more information. 1. Roughly how many trucks, drivers and trailers do you have to work with? 2. how often do trucks change trailers and drivers change trucks. 3. Is it safe to assume that the truck is connected to the trailer and the truck to a driver? (obviously from a Database perspective, I understand that a driver needs a truck to pull the trailer) 4. How many different people are going to be using this program, just you or more? Sorry to respond with questions, but for a best case, they really do matter. Hopefully with that, someone else may chime it.

I'm certainly not an authority, but I would think you are ok to run without pausing it. If you import records from a filemaker db, it will wait until the last step is done. In any other situation I can think of, it waits for the previous step to finish before it goes onto the next step. It never hurts to just try it and see. Testing is always a part of development.

You simply put a '...' in between. so 6/1/2008...6/30/2008. If you are doing it in a calculation, you need to trick it to allow the '...', using "let" is a good way to do it.