Hello!

FMP 5.5. Mailing list application. Two related files: "households" and "dancers". Household records are related to one or more individuals (dancers) on "household_id". Some household records have a single e-mail address which serves all the members of the household. I have a calculated field which formats them like this:

"John Smith, Jane Doe" <[email protected]>

(and leaves the field blank if the household doesn't have an e-mail address). Many individuals also have their own e-mail address, and these are listed on the individual's record in the "dancers" file. I also have a calculated field to format the "full e-mail address" for individual dancers. Easy enough to find all records in both database files which have an e-mail address. Now I want to create a layout which displays a sorted master list of *all* e-mail addresses, whether they come from the "household" or the "dancers" file. (I would also like to be able to export this list as a text file.) What would be an effective way to approach this?

Thanks for any advice.

Regards,

Steven Nagy

Well... that's a stickler. You'll have to change your structure, as you can't display two tables in the same portal. My best suggestion would be as follows:

Build a third table called 'Addresses', and then have the email address entry in the original Dancer and Household DB's generate an email record in this second file. This way, you have all those addresses in one file. Actually this gives you a few other advantages too, one being that you can enter more than one email addresss per record. But that's the tack I would take. Otherwise, if you don't want Data Entry to go into this table directly, I GUESS you could just export each of the database's email fields into one table every time you need to make the sorted list, but that's just begging for a synchronization problem, as far as I'm concerned.