Searching multiple portal rows

[bayrumboy]

I have a database that tracks education-related Personnel, Agencies and Affiliations (the join between a person and agency). In an Affiliation record, I track the role(s) that a person performs at a given agency. I store the roles in an 'affiliation role' table and the data is viewed through a portal (in the main Affilation screen).

Problem:

At an agency, a person generally fills more than one role (principal, administrator, school board chair). If I do a search in find mode, I can only enter one role in a portal. I can search for principles, or administrators. What if I want to enter more than one role so that I can find all of the people who are principles AND administrators? Is this possible? What is considered the BEST PRACTICE for this kind of scenerio?

Thank you all in advance.

[LiveOak]

The search should be performed in the related file which the portal displays.

-bd

[bayrumboy]

Understood. That is how i've been doing it thus far.

The difficulty is this:

I am attempting to set up a find layout in such a way that a non-programmer user can and enter all of the criteria they wish to find in one screen - perhaps this is impossible?

In the affiliation screen, we also record an affiliation address (the assumption is that a person may be affiliated with an agency and yet have a different mailing address than the agency's address). Suppose a user wanted to find all of the affiliation records that were principals and administrators in the state of Michigan?

Do I need to do this by leading the user through a multi-step find procedure - i would like to avoid it if possible?

Thank you.

[transpower]

Make role a checkbox field. Then do the find with that.

[bayrumboy]

That could work, and that's how it was done a couple of years ago, but there are some very similarly worded role names: "Principal" & "Assistant Principal". The issue then was, when someone would search for "Principal", all of the principal records were returned, but so were all of the assistant principal records.

so - we went this new route where we stored the record and the record's roles in two different tables...

[-Queue-]

You can use the double-equals sign to limit your search to the selected word only. Set Field [searchfield; "==" & globalenteredtext]

[transpower]

I've confirmed your problem; I didn't expect your checkbox choices to contain some of the same words! But if you had used, say, AssistantPrincipal, it would have worked.