Problem with a portal field

[Gabe]

Hey guys,

I've just started using filemaker, I'm coming from a web database programming background. I understand relationships and all that stuff, but I am still coming to terms with how FM deals with them.

I have a simple setup so far. Im keeping track of a set of lawsuits. I have a suits table and a parties table. I have a join table linking them, with a field for the suit id and the party id. I also have a field in the join table telling whether the party is a plaintiff or a defendant.

On the layout for the suits table I added a portal to pull a list of the parties involved. I added the field in the join table for partytype, but in all of the rows it only shows the value of the first join record.

In parties, I have:

1 John

2 Henry

In suits

1 lawsuit

Then I have PartiesInSuit:

1 1 Plaintiff

2 1 Defendant

THe portal shows

John Plaintiff

Henry Plaintiff

If I change the field next to Henry to Defendant, it changes the record for John in the join table. I guess I don't have it set up right. Parties can be involved in multiple suits, so I cant add the partytype in the parties table itself. WHy is it behaving this way?

[-Queue-]

Can you post a zipped copy or clone of your file?

[Gabe]

I re-added the portal and it started working fine.

FM seems to have a few little bugs. I was working on a layout not too long ago and FM gave me an error message saying the file was corrupted and needed to be recovered. I ran a recovery and it said the file was too damaged to recover. I ended up losing a few days work.

Needless to say I save a copy of my stuff every time I make a working change.