filtering portals

[veganboyjosh]

i have a portal that's filtered according to two fields. the client number, and the month&year of the jobs.

i'm doing some diagmnostic tests, and i noticed that there's a few records from the child file that are making it into the portal but the two match fields don't match.

for example, for a portal from december, jobs for a certain client will be from november and december.

i need to fix this, but i can't figure out why it's doing this. the relationship seems to be fine, it seems to be that somewhere it's _just_ _not_ _working_. i'm pulling out my hair wondering what it could be, does anyone out there have any ideas???

thanks in advance for any help...

josh

[LaRetta]

Hi Josh,

"client number, and the month&year"

What are the concatenated calculation keys? What are the data types for the fields these calcs are based upon? Do you have a space (or other word separator) between the two? What do your resultant keys look like and are they numeric?

I've read many times about the problems associated with using numeric keys. The Client number's length could change one to several characters and the month/year could also change by 1 character. If your ClientNumber is text, do you have the number preceeded with zeros? If not (or it's numeric), you could have a possible overlap of matching keys. And what if the Month/year field is empty? ClientNumber 111988 could actually match ClientNumber 1 with month/date of 11998 (January, 1998). This is probably a poor example, but I hope you see where I'm going with it.

Your ClientNumber should be text because, text is cool in that it will accept anything - and numeric operations (and date calculations) can still be performed on them. So an incrementing serial number would work. Your key calculations should also be text with a space between the two fields; something like:

ClientNumber & " " & Month(DateField) & " " & Year(DateField)

Maybe that will clean it up. Answers to the first questions above, and one specific example would help us pinpoint it exactly - but this could be your type of problem.

Another possibility ... you have the wrong field placed in the portal - possibly from another relationship. Double-click the field to show Specify Field and make sure it matches the portal. That's all I can think of.

LaRetta