Filemaker 7 Relationships

[Paul Grogan]

I have several Tables showing in portals in a customer file using IDCust as the key relating the two tables - for example:

Contact using a relationship I call Cust.IDCust.Contacts which relates the table Cust to Contacts using IDCust as the Key

Invoice using a relationship I call Cust.IDCust.InvH which relates the table Cust to InvH using IDCust as the Key

These relationships work fine and show the related table fields in portals as expected.

However when I try in a layout of the Contacts table to show the Customer Name - situated in the Cust table using the reverse related table Cust it does not work in all cases even though Cust is shown as a related table when I select fields to show in my layout. - the Customer Name field in Cust shows a blank!

In another Table related in a similar way to Cust the layout relationshilp with Cust works fine with changes in IDCust showing the correct Customer Name!

I am confused! I thought relationships worked both ways in Filemaker7. I have got over the problem by creating a new relationship from the Contacts table back to the Cust file - Contacts.IDCust.Cust - do I have to do this? Can anyone help?

[-Queue-]

Relationships do work both ways, as long as both key fields can be indexed. Both keys must be of the same type (text, number, etc.) also.

It isn't enough to have a relationship, the data in the key fields of the relationship must match. Make sure that IDCust is the same in all records that should be related.