Portal for contacts with unique field per record

[Adam AIS]

I am working on a project management type system. Part of the project report will be a portal which lists "involved people."

I have a couple questions about how I should set this up.

The portal would look something like this:

-------- -------------------------------------------------

[ menu ] First Name_______________________________________

Last Name________________________________________

Company__________________________________________

-------- -------------------------------------------------

[ menu ] First Name_______________________________________

Last Name________________________________________

Company__________________________________________

-------- -------------------------------------------------

1) Some projects may have one person others might have ten. Because of this I figure I have to use a portal?

2) For the most part involved people will be different for each project, but how can I make it so that there are not duplicates and we can manage a separate file of contacts/people?

3) The menu field will specify how the person is involved in the project and the options will be pulled from a value list. How can I make it so that on project a John Smith is a programmer but on project b John Smith is a manager without duplicate entries in the contacts/people database? Technically John Smith could also be the programmer and manager for the same project.

Thanks!

[ESpringer]

It sounds like you need a "join" file. In other words, you have three kinds of entities: people (store contact info there); projects (store overview info there) and *ways to be involved*. You never have to open the join file after creating it, but you'd need it to mediate between people and projects.

Each record of the join file will include a person's name (or ID); a project name (or ID), and a role name (manager/programmer/coffee-maker). Then, you make relations TO the join file FROM each of your other databases, and enable "allow creation of related records" so that new join records can be created. You'll want to set up a value list based on the project IDs so that the names mesh well...

[Adam AIS]

Sorry it's taken my so long to reply. I've been working on other aspects of the project.

I got it to work using a joiner file like suggested. Everything works perfectly, however I need a way to number each person involved in a project. I was thinking I could number them based on the portal they are located in. I'm sure how to do this though.

-------- -------------------------------------------------

PROGRAMMER #1 First Name_______________________________________

Last Name________________________________________

Company__________________________________________

-------- -------------------------------------------------

PROGRAMMER #2 First Name_______________________________________

Last Name________________________________________

Company__________________________________________

-------- -------------------------------------------------

DEVELOPER #3 First Name_______________________________________

Last Name________________________________________

Company__________________________________________

-------- -------------------------------------------------

DESIGNER #4 First Name_______________________________________

Last Name________________________________________

Company__________________________________________

-------- -------------------------------------------------

Any help would be much appreciated.