I am new to the FM7 World and am having some difficulty with a portal setup.

I have created a portal based on Owner information. But the way it is setup I cannot add another owner without going to the owner layout and duplicating the record and changing the owner name.

Also one of the standard templates that came with FM7 is the People Management template. On this template once information is entered into the "issues" or "goals" portal another field is opened automatically. I was wondering how that happened. Thanks.

Hi Slickwilly9,

To address this, you will first need to ascertain which Table Occurrence (TO) the layout is based on and which TO the portal is based on.

It will be easy to tell which layout the portal is based on by going into layout mode (on the layout in question), where you will see the name of the portal TO appearing at the lower left of the portal.

While still in layout mode, select the 'Layout Options...' command from the Layouts menu and take note of the TO name that appears under the heading 'Show records from' in the layout options dialog. That is the TO that the Layout is based on.

With this information, go to the Define Relationships dialog and click on the 'Relationships' tab. Find the relationship line that connects the TO that the layout is based on to the TO that the portal is based on. In the middle of the line you will see the relationship definition box and when you double-click on it the relationship definition dialog will apear.

In the relationship definition dialog, underneath the side which relates to the TO that the portal is based on, avtivate the checkbox labelled 'Allow creation of records in this table via this relationship'.

Once you accept the dialogs to apply this setting, you should find that a blank row appears at the bottom of the portal, and that entering data into the blank row automatically creates a new record in the table on which the portal is based.

As regards your second question, it is not clear what you mean. You say that 'a field is opened automatically'. However fields cannot be 'opened'. A field can automatically acquire data via an auto-entry option (specified in the options dialog accessible from the field tab in the Define Database dialog). Or a field can be selected (ie the cursor placed in it - a feat which is generally accomplished by setting up the tab order in layout mode. Or perhaps you mean something else altogether - in which case it might be helpful if you were to expand on your question.