Portal conundrum....

[kiwiora]

Be gentle.. I'm a newbie to this and the attached file is my first attempt at a portal!!

First of all, all feedback on its design would be welcome. Basically the idea of this database is to feed in all information for incorporation of a new company including shareholders/directors.

Once you have entered an ACN in the main data entry, entering this again in the shareholder region will copy info into screen.

My problems are as follows:

Adding shares is chunky and full of loop-holes. If a user is playing around in shares, they could quite easily see the record as being empty as opposed to being in the wrong shareholder layout. Problem could be resolved with listing all shareholders in one long list but even then this gets messy.

When creating a record for each share, I notice that the portal does not list one after the other. Rather, it lists it in the spaces as per the original shareholder records. Example - shareholder 3 has a shareholding, gap and then the next shareholding.

The final issue with this format is when I am exporting information to word the portal will not work. It appears portals are really only for on-screen use and not for exporting information. Unless there is any other way around this, the whole portal is a waste of space and i will have to go to creating a field for every aspect of the share (i.e 6x shareholder1shareclass and so on).

You're probably all on your chrissy hols so if I don't hear from anyone, hope you had/have a great chrissy break!

company.zip

[Ocean West]

kiwiora,

First off your designe approach is nice and fresh you have a great start at UI.

For the best approach you might consider another file. Since any one company could have a number of share holders you might not want to lock your self in to only 6 shareholders.

Your first file would be a company file, the second file could be share holders/directors. and the third file would be shares, this third file is where your data will print from as it contains all the necessary links back to the parent files. You could also export the data as well.

I have uploaded an example of the relationships for the 3 files.

[kiwiora]

Hi,

Thanks for your feedback. I've made up the design from a number of sources including joe's graphite, filemaker templates and a bit of old mucking around myself. So thanks to them!

I think I understand all of what you've said but will have to work through it.

Unfortunately the attachment is incompatible with my pc. Would it be possible to upload the file as a zip?

Cheers

Jan

[Ocean West]

Here is the file as zip

example.zip