Portal w/Many to Many Relationship?

[Bill C.]

I'm brand new at Filemaker (Dev 7), coming from an MS Access/SQL Server background.

My database schema contains several many-to-many relationships, represented as usual with a "relationship table". The canonical example is a student table, a class table, and a student_class table. So, given that I have a layout displaying a given student, how do I display the class information for that student, given that the info I wish to display is actually in the class table, but I have to go through the student_class table to get the recordset?

Thanks in advance,

[comment]

Make the portal show records from the join table.

Put fields from class table into the portal.

[Bill C.]

By "join table" do you mean the student_class table? Can I actually write an SQL join with which to populate the portal?

Thanks for the response.

[comment]

Yes to the first question. Not sure what your second question means.

[RalphL]

No to the second question. FMP does not use SQL. It has its own scripting. It is a different system than what you are used to. It will take a little getting used to but the learning curve is not steep.

[Reed]

On the student table layout, you just place a portal for the student_class table. To show the actual class information in the student_class portal, you just place fields from the class table in the portal. You don't have to perform any "SELECT blah FROM blah WHERE blah" query to do a join, you just have to define the relationships properly in the graph.

To actually add records to the join you can either add them directly to the portal by entering data in the last row, or you can use a script to add the records.