Coloured Records

[Ninja]

I've been trying to make a traker for the finance company i work for. The database holds information on customers who have applied for a loan with us, each application will have a status of Pending, Not Paid, Paid, Declined or Cancelled. I am trying to make it such that each record is colour coded to the state the application is in.

I have had some success in making colours appear depending on the state by creatin 5 fields each named as one of the 5 possible states and containing that state. then creating 5 relationship each from the status field to one of the state fields. Then creating 5 portals, one for each state and putting a different colour box in each portal. Thus if the current status is 'Pending' then the Pending self-relationship is true and the pending portal shows the colour box in it.

This much is fine, however as soon as i put each portal ontop of each other it messes up because it can't tell which box is in which portal, and then wehne i put the information fields into it it totally screws up!

I hear that FileMaker 7 may have some kind of solution to this, is there any way of doing it in 6 though? If so could someone give me an example?

Thanks

[Ender]

I don't see why you need portals for this.

Why not use 5 global container fields for the color blocks, and one calc field (with container result) that chooses a color block based on the Status?

[Tony O]

I don't see why you need portals for this.

Why not use 5 global container fields for the color blocks, and one calc field (with container result) that chooses a color block based on the Status?

Agreed. I use that method for an office in/out board.

You don't need a relationship at all to access the globals; just set them up in a seperate table. Then make sure your container field in the working layout is set to auto enter a calculation to pick the color based on a value list, and have it set to replace existing value, always evaluate.

Attached is an example.

hth,

Tony

- NOTE: the download is an FP7 file. I will post the FP6 example in a few minutes.

- NOTE: download now contains both fp6 and fp7 examples.

coloredstates.zip

[Frink1234]

Thanks for the tip Ender and the attachment TonyO. It's too cool for me not to find some way to use it in my app!

[Tony O]

Thanks, no trouble at all!

Tony

[dwins]

Just curious as to why you're getting the colors from gif files instead of just copying color-filled rectangles in Layout to paste in to the globals?

[Tony O]

Just curious as to why you're getting the colors from gif files instead of just copying color-filled rectangles in Layout to paste in to the globals?

Force of habit, that's all. The original database was an in-out board, and the squares were little smart-ass cartoon icons. Layout objects should work just fine.

Tony

[Ninja]

Brilliant, works a treat, never really used containers before. I'll keep them in mind in future.

Thanx