Copy Data from all related records

[7kman]

Hi all, I am new to the forum here, and new to FM7, though FM user for years.

I had a question that I hope I can make simple.

I am creating a solution for a music school that has tables for FAMILIES, STUDENTS, FACULTY and INVOICES. The relations are all set nice, students to their families, for billing etc. BUT here's where I need help. I create an invoice and enter a FAMILY number. That easily pops up all the corresponding students with their info and lesson costs through a portal into the invoice.

But of course, I don't want to use that portal directly, I want to use a Line Item Table, so the invoices will not get altered in the future when student records are changed. So I have the line item DB, which I have done before, but I can't seem to get a script working that will automatically create the four or six, or whatever new records for those corresponding students. I thought I was smarter than this, but I can only get it to pull them up in value lists, like a typical line item invoice.

Thanks for any help!

[7kman]

Well, at least since I didn't get any replies, I didn't waste anyone's time. I figured out what I was doing wrong with my scripts.

You do have to play with things a bit because working within those Portals is a little flakey, I am doing some pasting to fields I don't even need, just to get it to work consistently.

Thanks anyway.

[Vaughan]

Not quite sure what you are trying to do.

Look into the ValueListItems() function in conjunction with a value list based on a relationship. It can be useful for contatenating related information together, but it's limitation is that duplicates are ignored and the values are always listed in alphabetical order.

There are some commercial plugins that are also useful for this that do not suffer these limitations.