another one of the "newbee" question you love!!!

[caro3252]

have a question. is there anyway to format information gather in a portal in a non-portal way (as a sentence):.I have a data entry layout that gathers information using a portal (it is for a sales department and when the sales rep is creating a bid for a custumer he creates new portal rows for each item.). in the report/print out layout, I have a portal that display the information gathered from the data entry layout throough a portal, but was wondering if I could get filemaker to display some of the information gathered in the portal as a [color:"blue"] sentence. (with programing languages such as C, I would either use an array, a loop or similar to give a new name to each row and then format the output, but I can't figure out a way to do it in filemaker)... anybody has any ideas??? (i tried using a script in the definition of the variable(if Variable=0, set variable=""), and get it to slide during printing (i figure if it saw a blank space then it will assume it had no information and not show them, but it didn't work (and also it displayed "0" instead of a blank space) )but it didn't work get it to work)

[Fenton]

The way that you get all the values of a related field (a portal is just a way of viewing the fields of the records matching a relationship) is to use the Design function "ValueListItems(Database name, Value List name)." There are a few steps.

You must first create a value list which has the values of the relationship. You do that by "filtering" the value list, choosing "Values from a field," then "Only related values." You specify the relationship of the portal, then the field which has the items in question. Let's name this value list "Items."

Next step is to create a calculation field to hold the above, using ValueListItems. It must have its Storage Options set explicitly to "Do not store calculation results".

_cItems_VL = Substitute ( ValueListItems ( Status(CurrentFileName), "Items"), "

[RDecker]

> is there anyway to format information gather in a

> portal in a non-portal way (as a sentence)?

Depending on the specifics, you can use Merge Fields in regular text to create a sentence just like a word processing merge letter.