Question on performing finds in a portal

[ibiubu]

Is it possible to perform a find in a portal? More specific, when i go to my layout with the portal, enter find mode, select a field and enter my find criteria, and select find, the portal still shows all the related records, I was expecting it to show only the related records that met the find criteria.

LR

[Kurt Knippel]

You are ALWAYS finding record IN the current DB. In the above case you were finding records in your master DB which had the find criteria in one of its related records.

[ibiubu]

OK, so then am I correct to assume that if I search a portal, I am not really searching the related database, but am searching the database I am in, that is why the search results are not coming up as I would expect in the portal?

So does this mean that the only way to actually search a portal is to go to the related database itself and perform the search/

How about a pre-determined search, can I have a script in the main database that runs a script that resides in the related database, thus showing the desired results in the portal?

LR

[CobaltSky]

The main point of a portal is to find and display all records which are related to the current record. That means that portals are by definition based on a relationship (and an implicit 'find' procedure defined by that relationship). Bear in mind that to do a further find in a portal would cut across the chief value and purpose of a portal as a relationship based phenomenon (ie the portal would then no longer be based solely on the relationship, so one would never be sure what one was looking at in the portal - related records or some wider or narrower selection...).

An alternative you might consider - which may or may not suit your purposes - would be to create a special separate portal based on a new relationship where the primary field is a global field in your main file. Then when you enter 'criteria' into the global field, the records which appear in the portal will be only those which exactly match your entry.

If you want to be able to find ranges or more complex combinations of criteria with this approach, you may need more than one field, and either a script (eg to create a multi-key entry from parameters you have input) or a calculation (to concatenate one or more parameters you input with data drawn from fields in the current database).

It is also possible to combine such an approach with an existing relationship based portal, by basing the relationship on a calculation which alters the key field contents based on what it finds in your global 'filter' field.

If you want to go further than the techniques I've referred to above, you might want to check out a third-party plug-in available from Waves In Motion, called the Portal Filter plug-in, which facilitates more flexible and complex filtering/finding criteria. More info can be found at: http://wmotion.com/portalfilter.html

But bear in mind that there is scope for immense confusion if users no longer know whether what they see in a portal represents a list of related records - or some other sub-set. So user education will probably be one of the most significant contributors to the success of such a venture.

[Vaughan]

I have a solution where records are "people" and their phone numbers are in a related database, listed through a portal. Performing a find for a particular phone number works exactly as I would expect: it displays all the "people" records who have matched the phone number criteria.

[CyberSport]

I have gotten portal searches to work just as Vaughan describes above, however I am getting in trouble now with searching in a DB which is the "one" in a "one-to-many" relationship and the portal search is into the "many" DB. If I do any search, I get the "no matching records" dialogue box, but if I do a straight search in the related DB, no problem. This is an issue, as I'm trying to construct a search on 2 fields, one a related field in the one-to-one relationship, and the other being the portal.

Any ideas why this isn't working?

Bevin