I having been using the book, "Special Edition FileMaker 7" by Chris Moyer and others. It is generaly a good book: very deep explanations of relational database concepts and it touches upon just about every detail in FileMaker 7, covers a lot of sophisticated subjects.

It is, however, not very good in the editing. Any book this size needs an excellent index (comes in at almost 1100 pages), this book's index is so, so at best. It has a number of typos' and a problem with staying in sequence when explaining an example of the current subject.

On that note I built one of the examples in the book, pages 168 - 173. The point of the lesson is to illuminate how to use a value list, drawn from a related table's ID field, to assign people to certain shifts, it is a many to many relationship.

I have included an attachment of the file because I cannot for the life of me get it to do what is described in the book. You are supposed to be able to click on the portal in the Shift layout and have a popup list appear so that you can assign a member to the a shift but the popup refuses to appear.

I have reread the book several times and rebuilt the thing several times but no go. There is a typo on one page about building the portal in the table ShiftAssignment but all the images show that the portal is built in the Shift table, so I may have that setup incorrectly.

Can someone please take a look at this and explain what I am doing wrong? I am desperate to learn this stuff but stuck.

Edited September 7, 200520 yr by Guest

The portal needs to be show records from ShiftAssignment - that is where you want to create records.

Thanks a million, that did it.

Still getting this stuff down...

Edited September 7, 200520 yr by Guest