selective pop-up list

[foodminer]

I have an inventory table joined to a line item table through an ingredient name field. The inventory table contains a list of ingredients used in my restaurant. It also contains a category field which allows me to to assign categories such as seafood, fruit, vegetables, meat, dairy, etc. to different ingredients. I created a value list based on the ingredient name field in the inventory table and attached it to the ingredient name field in the line item table which gives me a pop-up list of 1300 ingredient names. That's a lot of scrolling to do each time I need to find and enter an ingredient name.

Data entry would be much easier if I could limit the names in the pop-up list to specific categories. For example, I would need only items that belong to the seafood category to appear in the pop-up list.

How best to achieve that?

I hope my explanation is not too confusing.

Thanks in advance.

[Stick]

you would probably need 2 drop downs - one for the group and then another with the ingredients in.

the ingredients one would need to be a value list defined "from field" and then selected to use related values only.

[Karma]

ok, i have a similar problem:

(sorry if i explain bad, but i am also new to FM...)

I have a quote table and in it is a portal to a product table. The portal contains fields for category, productID, Name, Price and %Markup. The latter three i can automate the field to be filled in depending on the product ID entered, however i have many products.

I have the category and productID as pop-up lists. I need the productID list to only show products in the selected category.

I tried to make the ProductID relative to the category, but found that the relative option is only avaliable for related tables. (the category field is part of the PRroduct record.

how would i go about sorting this?

[lavaface]

I have the same problem. I work in a computer lab that checks out digital camera equipment. I am currently building an interface to enter every item into our inventory. Everything will be barcoded with a unique id. I have created a value list to input the general category a piece of equipment belongs to (e.g. video camera, still camera, audio equipment, computers etc.) I would like the next field, "model name" to be a value list that changes according to the general category chosen. For example, chosing video cameras would cause the model list to populate with our video cameras. Choosing a particular video camera (say Canon GL2) would cause the parts list for that kit to provide the appropriate dropdown menu. I know this is possible with HTML forms with Javascript or PHP. Can this be done in Filemaker Developer 7? I feel like it's possible but don't know where to start. I'll continue to search the forums, but just wanted to add that I have the same need as other posters to this thread.

Thanks,

Jonathan

[The Shadow]

I did a similar example on this thread:

http://www.fmforums.com/threads/showflat.php?Number=106269

I attach a modified version that also shows the already-entered cities on a popup for the collections table. karma, notice I added a self-join to view the related cities from the same table the data is being entered into.

[lavaface]

Thanks Shadow! You saved me a bunch of searching. I looked over your sample file and will try to apply it at work tomorrow.

[oilcan]

I have a similar problem to this, but I want to filter a pop-up list with two items.

here's the scenario: in the main file, let's call it Primary Production, there's 3 fields of interest:

MHC allele, Starting Date, and Lot number. Lot number is the pop-up list I want to trim down, in a plain state it will list several hundred lot numbers, too tedious. In a related file, let's call it Reagent Production, which contains records of the lots referenced by Lot number, there's creation date, expiration date, and MHC allele fields. MHC allele is directly related to the field of the same name in the Primary Production, and so can be used to drastically trim the pop-up list to around 20ish lot numbers. Also, after much tinkering around, I managed to use the creation and expiration dates in the second file and the Starting Date in the main file to set up a smart range, as described here:

http://www.onegasoft.com/tools/smartranges/index.shtml

so lot numbers could be filtered out by whether the start date in Primary Production falls in between creation and expiration dates of each lot in Reagent Production. This produces a different but very similarly effective trimming of the pop-up list.

Now, if only I could do both of these at once, the list would be trimmed to one item, as there is only one non-expired lot of a given MHC allele at a time. Am I missing something really obvious here, because I can't for the life of me figure out how to do both of them at once, and this would be so ideal if I could pull this off.

o, yeah, i'm a noob.

[The Shadow]

Do you have FM7? If so, you can create a relationship with multiple predicates, and use <= and >= to for your dates, rather than the smart-ranges stuff.

[Ender]

oilcan said:

Now, if only I could do both of these at once, the list would be trimmed to one item, as there is only one non-expired lot of a given MHC allele at a time. Am I missing something really obvious here, because I can't for the life of me figure out how to do both of them at once, and this would be so ideal if I could pull this off.

You can use concatenated keys with the smart ranges technique to further filter the relationship. Mikhail has an example on the First Edition page of his Smart Ranges web site. Look at the "A Range to Dates" sample.

[oilcan]

@The Shadow,

negative...using 5.5. So unfortunately I can't use this advice. But thanks for your help.

@Ender,

Thanks for the info, this helped me pin it down. Seems the 1st edition version more clearly states the meaning of prefixes and suffixes, I didn't get their purpose from reading only the Second Edition version. Everything now works as hoped!