Summary Text Field

[Marc H.]

I am a NEWBIE, so forgive me.

I have two tables, tableone and tabletwo, they are joined by a relationship that can add new records to tabletwo from tableone. The relationship is joined at tableone::id and tabletwo::tableoneid. There are fields in tabletwo that contain text called for sake of discussion kitchenSummary. I am trying to make a text field in tableone that contains text from all the related kitchenSummary entries in tabletwo maintaining text formatting.

Stumped, can anyone help?

[RalphL]

Have you tried a portal? The portal would have to be sized so that the text box would be the same in both tables. Since you can enter the text in tableone the formatting could be done there. The user never needs to go to tabletwo.

[Marc H.]

the problem is that the kitchenSummary field can contain anywhere from a sentence to several (10+) and there can be up to 10 related records with the same type of variable information. I am trying to put the "text sum" (for lack of a better word) in a report that can be printed leaving quite a bit of room for this variation.

[RalphL]

If you are going to print a report, do it from tabletwo. You can use sliding set to reduce the enclosed part to get rid of the gaps.

[Marc H.]

understand but the next problem with that is that tableone contains a master report that contains stuff from the master record as well as other related records from tables in tabletwo.

[Marc H.]

still looking for help on a calculation to get the data

[-Queue-]

You can put related fields from tableone in your report in tabletwo.

Alternately, you could create a value list of the related text field, starting from tableone, including and sorting by tabletwo::id, and use an unstored calculation in tableone of

ValueListItems( Get(FileName); "yourValueList" )

to retrieve a return-delimited list of the related items.

[Marc H.]

B) THANKS!! that worked great, now, how can i maintain the text formatting aka colors? or put two carriage returns between list items?

[-Queue-]

Are they all the same color? If so,

TextColor( Substitute( ValueListItems( Get(FileName); "yourValueList" ); ¶; "¶¶" ); T )

where T is your color as RGB( x; y; z ) or its corresponding numeric value.

If they are not all the same color, how do you determine which text has which color?

[Marc H.]

Thanks for everyone's help on this, got it working with the valuelist option and talked customer into summary of this text being all same color. Had conditionals in text fields on originating table where if the text was something other than "acceptable" text would be red.