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

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?

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

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!

Thanks, no trouble at all!

Tony

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?

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

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

Thanx