[HELP] with portals and table occurrences

[jpons]

Hello,

I am back to working in FMP after a multi-year hiatus, and I am rusty and am currently stuck. Hoping someone can point me in the right direction. I hope I am posting in the right topic.

I am building a solution where we have a number of many-to-many relationships that are being used via portals.

This is the issue that I am having that I am stumped on.

In this instance I have the following db graph:

Workshops <--=--> WorkshopStaff <--=--> Staff

Each workshops may have multiple Staff and Staff may participate in Multiple workshops

On the Workshops layout I have a portal to WorkshopsStaff

In order to add Staff to the Workshop I have a button that brings up a popover with a portal that lists all Staff from which to select. I can select a Staff Member and they get added to the WorkshopStaff table.

This popover was more or less modeled on the "invoices" starter solution

The way I am displaying the portal inside the popover is via a table occurrence like this:

Staff <--X--> StaffList (Cartesian relationship)

My issue is that the portal in the popover (the result of the cartesian relationship) displays and works as intended as long as I have one related entry in the WorkshopClient table.

But for a new Workshop for which I don't yet have any entries in the WorkshopClient table the portal in my popover comes up empty.

What I am doing wrong or is there a better way to populate the list from which to select staff?

Thanks a bunch.

-J

Edited January 18, 2017 by jpons

[comment]

Why don't you relate the StaffList TO directly to Workshops?

[jpons]

Thanks for the quick reply. Not sure how I would do that since they do not share a key. The relationship between Staff and workshop is all thru the WorkshopStaff table.

 

I have been working with true relational databases for a long time, so I may be missing something here in FMP.

[comment]

6 minutes ago, jpons said:

Not sure how I would do that since they do not share a key.

A relationship using the X relational operator does not need a matching key value. Just use any two fields as the matchfields.

 

--
P.S. What makes you think Filemaker is not a "true relational database"?

Edited January 18, 2017 by comment

[jpons]

I did not realize that... I will try that and see how that works.

Thank you.

[jpons]

Thank you so much for the help, this worked. I guess I thought I understood Table Occurrences, but obviously I don't.

Thanks,

-J