Situation:

Tables: contact.fp5 and purchase_order.fp5

I need to be able to select a contact key for the shipto, billto, soldby, etc fields in the purchase order. I have thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of contacts which I can sort through and limit some (only certain people are shipto, only certain people are billto, etc, but it doesn't limit things enough to make it easy to use, there iwll still be a lot to scroll through).

So I've seen two main ways of accomplishing this posted to the forum and in example databases. These are:

1) To "go shopping" for a contact (this is my preferred way) by storing the purchase order primary key into the contact database as a temporary variable choosing the contact, and inserting the primary key for the contact table into appropriate field for the purchase order. I really like this way of doing things, however if I'm using a temporary variable, and two people are "going shopping" then they will be overwriting this variable and one person might select a contact for the wrong purchase order etc. I tried making a temporary/join table that would create a new record per "going shopping" but I couldn't then build a relationship between the temporary table and the contact database without a variable (same problem).

2) The other way I've seen is by using a searchable portal in a new layout. I haven't quite figured out how this is implemented yet, but I don't like it because I don't have all the functionality of searching/listing/etc that I've built into the contact table already.

Any ideas?

Jon

1) one is OKAY, since globals are assigned to every user separately. (which can be a pain sometimes....)

Both ways are good

Go for the search in the contacts file if you want to search on many parameters, go for the filtered portal if you want to filter by categories

(see these tip files on the topic:

http://www.buliga.it/TipFiles/FPwRelVL.sit

http://www.buliga.it/TipFiles/FPwRelVL.zip

http://www.buliga.it/TipFiles/OR_Portal.sit

http://www.buliga.it/TipFiles/OR_Portal.zip)

An excellent add-on IMO would some interface tweaking so that the choice would take place in a separate window floating on top of the Orders.fp5 file: this would make the whole process pretty user-friendly

Those portal examples were invaluable, thank you so much, it is exactly what I want to do.