Why won't same info load in multiple places? Why portal won't work ever?

[JudyMom]

I made an application with four tables: Invoice, InvoiceLineItems,DailyLog, and Contacts.

I would like the application to work as follows:

On a daily basis, I enter info in DailyLog. That info would consist of the company name from Contacts, the date, a description, the hours. Other fields in this table are IDDailyLog auto serial number.

Once a month, I would like to create an invoice for a given contact. I would like to have the company name, contact, address fill based on selection of company. Then I would like to pull in the information for that company for the month via a portal. I would like the portal to display the date, description, hours, rate, total.

I have a PrintInvoice layout that is based on list view that I will email.

I have tried a gazillion ways of doing this. In each case, some parts work while others don't, and I can never get the portal to work. I have done the Filemaker associate and specialist tutorial courses, and recreated everything along with the tutor plus I have worked on another inventory program (traditional product inventory order), so you'd think I'd be able to do this, but no. UGH. I know I don't yet have a good understanding of relationships but I don't think that is all of my problem. Can anyone assist me with this?

[comment]

Does your invoice include any items other than the hours you have logged in the DailyLog table? If not, then I don't see why you would need the InvoiceLineItems table. All you would need to do at the end of the month is find the DailyLog records in the given month, get a list of unique contacts in the current found set, and create an invoice for each. 

It would be a somewhat unorthodox arrangement where the invoice would be related to its "line items" by contact ID and by the month - but then any arrangement where child records are created before the parent is a bit unorthodox.

 

[JudyMom]

The invoice would have the rate and the total (hours*rate) and a grand total, plus, obviously the invoice date and invoice number. I need to be able to keep a log daily, and originally I set it up the way you described but it didn't work. Then I thought I could treat the dailylog entries as "products" and pull them in by company and date, or date and company. Maybe my first iteration had some minor issue and I've over-created because I couldn't find it.

I guess I could always redo the whole thing and start with the invoice first (populate the company info, invoice number) and then log the daily info from there.  

[comment]

3 hours ago, JudyMom said:

originally I set it up the way you described but it didn't work

"Didn't work" is not a useful description of problem. See if the attached demo can get you started.

 

 

CreateMonthlyInvoices.fmp12

Edited November 4, 2023 by comment

[JudyMom]

Oh my gosh, it was so nice of you to send that. Yours works exactly as I wanted, combining the clients with a time frame (the month). I didn't know how to do that! I'm not sure I'll ever know what all was wrong with my portal, even after comparing side-by-side with yours. It's not populating all of the fields of each record, and the record fields it is populating are not populating all in the same row. I will redo with yours and then add the extra fields one at a time. I already added a description field in the portal within your demo and it works fine.

I had definitely put too many duplicate fields on different tables "in case I needed them" and it resulted in a mess. 

Thank you for your kind help.

Edited November 4, 2023 by JudyMom