Curious if anyone has come up with a nifty technique for displaying different portals (one at a time, in the same space on the same layout) depending on some variable condition.

I have different sets of related information that I would like to show in one common area of a layout, but I do not want to duplicate layouts in order to show the different portals. Being able to hit a button (effectively, to change a global field) and then show a different portal in a "portal space" would vastly improve some layouts. I messed around with the portal "visibility" technique to try to do this but could not come up with a workable solution.

Thoughts?

Hows about messing with FIELD visibility instead? You can also change field TEXT color Just a thought. Haven't tried it.

Have you looked at Matt Petrowsky's "Dynamic Portal Display" sample? Check out www.filemakermagazine.com. This particular example is subscriber-only but if you're not already a subscriber, you should be. It's money very well spent. (And no, Matt didn't pay me for this endorsement. )

Abbe

Yes, I should check that out.

Thanks for the info.

Depending on how complicated your data structure is, you can roll your own single-file design even in FileMaker 3. You just make TableID one of the fields. This makes it very easy to do what you're talking about. See attached FM7 example.

Multitable.zip

Bruce -

Very groove-esque. It would be interesting to try to adapt that for use with more than one related table (with a sort of meta-table?). Thanks for the file.

Very nifty, Bruce. For my needs, I'm really using two different tables, but with some deep thought it might be possible to create a third "virtual table" to show data from the other tables in one space.