portal alternative?

[Macboy]

I'm trying to build a db to print shipping labels and an issue has come up where we need to display a list of letters on the shipping label.

Each product line item has an associated letter and the main label needs to have a list of the letters for products that match the match field.

There are a number of problems with the portal: the most significant here is that it lists the letters separately and vertically only.

The final list of letters should look like something like:

a, c, f, g, g, c

Anyone know how to build this list using calculations so that the list will be contained in a text field? This would be easy using Perl but it seems pretty difficult in FileMaker.

Thanks in advance.

[BobWeaver]

Here is yet another use for the aggregate concatenate function which unfortunately does not exist. Maybe in Filemaker version 6.

In the meantime, the alternative is to make a script with a loop to go through all the related records and concatenate the letter field contents together in another text field. You could do it in the portal by going from row to row, or do it in a script in the related file. I prefer the second approach.