I am looking for a real elegent way (in ver 7) to assign multiple tasks in a third table to a second table (the join file) so the people in the first table could be assign the same task. As each ask is added it will dissapear from the third table portal. The sample I made breaks when a person is selected and does not have any tasks assign to them (phil in the sample) , the selection portal relation ship breaks and goes blank.

I'm sure there is a cool rearangement I could do but am not seeing it. The funny thing is that is this was some one elses post the answer would be clear.

Note this is different than cobolt sky's example of a list manager in that items need to be assign to more then one person.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

Charles

relation tester.zip

I don't see an elegant way - but here's a brute force version using valuelists.

It creates a multi-key for all unassigned tasks in the people table, and relates using equality directly to another TO of the Tasks table.

hmm ... I have to be able to pick the selections from a portal as there is other information that must also be displayedon each portal row.

Any other takers?

Charles

My mod has a portal for selection, it is just based on the new "Unselected Tasks" TO that is joined directly to People TO via the new multi-key I created.

A much *better* complaint, IMO, would be that this will probably be too slow if the number of tasks were increased to a realistic number.

Alternatively, you could just ensure a record always exists in the assigns table for each person, and use an invalid task id (like 0) to indicate they have no tasks yet. That will allow your original relationship structure to work directly.

I've attached a revised version of your database, with a solution that may work for you. Basically, there's a new field in the people table called TasksKey, which is a multi-line key for the tasks relationship. It auto-enters all of the task IDs. Then, as you assign and unassign tasks, it removes and adds the respective task ID from the multi-line key.

The one caveat is that it could get cumbersome to add task IDs to existing people's TasksKey fields, but I'll leave that up to you. I'm thinking loops and inserts would do the trick. You could also start by adding task IDs up to 100 or so, and then you'd be covered if you never created more tasks than that.

relation tester.zip