I have a contact file in which I would like to show a relationship between contacts. These could be family members, business etc. I have tried creating a relationship with a field ContactID to ContactIDGlobal, where ContactID is a serialized number and ContactIDGlobal is a Global field. When I create the portal, I can't get any fields to show. Am I on the right track? Should I approach this differently? Why can't I enter the field within the portal?

Any help greatly appreciated

How do you know two contacts should be related? You said family members... how do you know they are in the same family? Let's say we go with the simplistic "if they have the same last name". In that case, you'd build your Self-Join such that it matched the LastName to LastName. In that way, you'd match all records in that file that had the same last name that this record has.

You may end up needing to match "last name and home phone". In that case, you'd need to create a calculated field that concatenated those two, and then create your self-relationship between that calculated field and itself.

HTH.

The problem I have is that there may be many types of relationships in this prospect database, Family Members maybe one type of relationship, it could also be a personal assistant for someone who does not belong to a company, could be people from the same company but I can have people from the same company I don't want related.

What I envision is to have a portal with a sorted pop up list that shows all contacts Last_Name, First_Name & Initial. The user would be able select the contact based on his personal knowledge of the two contacts and not necessarily on any other criteria. This way the user could click a button and go directly to the related contact instead of having to do a search and would allow other users to see the related contact without having perosnal knowledge of the relationship.

GDU

You lost me.

Part of that sounds like you want a popup list, not a portal.

Part of that sounds like you just want a nice list layout of your prospects where you can do ad-hoc sorts and finds.

Not sure I see a portal requirement yet.

But if you want a Portal that gets you a list of *all* prospects in the file, then you need a pair of match fields that always match for *all* records. Create a global 'gMatch' set to 1 and a calculation 'cMatch' that returns 1. Match the global to the calc. Now your self join will match every record.

Dear Kennedy

U have a sample file about self-join and portal as u described above. I would love to see it.

or could you send to me : [email protected]

Thanks