Mysterious Portal Problem

[Clare]

Hi there, I'm new to the forums.

We are having a few problems with portals in our database, and would be really grateful for anyone making any suggestions to help. Our clone file was too big to upload, even zipped up (I'll look into getting it smaller) so hopefully a description will do for now...

We have portals set up to display (amongst other things) advertising bookings, each booking on a new record. A few months ago, *some" of the records stopped showing up in the portal. If you do a search in one of the portal fields, it finds the records, but they don't show up in the portal - the record with the portal on it dispays with an empty portal (or a portal with some records that you KNOW are there, missing). It seems to affect records made after a certain date, but I can't find any problem with the script used to create them. Also some have been known to start showing up again for a limited time...

I've been told that it could be because there are too many relationships going on, but as I did not design the database and the person who did no longer works here, it makes it very hard to figure it out (I'm still a learner).

Any ideas? I'm keen to hear any suggestions anyone has! Hope this is the right forum for such a question; if not please redirect me.

Thankyou very much.

[IdealData]

Relationships/portals (briefly)

Your portals rely upon relationships, and each relationship definition has a "match" field in both files (or tables). Records with matching field values in the defined "match" field "belong" to the portal (relationship).

Accordingly, for each record without a suitable match then it willlnot display in the portal.

Suspicion...

The match field in the related file has lost it's original content, or it's original "master" record has been deleted, leaving orphaned records behind.

Clue...

Find the unmatched records and then display the "match" field, that will tell you where they belong, but not necessarily how they got where they are today.

[Clare]

Hi Mark, thanks for your reply - however, placing the match field "ID contributor" from both the "host" (where the portal is placed) record and the "portal" (the records the portal is showing) record on the "portal" layout they show up exactly the same... unless I change which table the "portal" layout is showing records form, then SOME are different but not all. Does that make any sense? I'm sure confused.

I've included a screen grab of the relationships graph, in case anyone is able to see any glaring errors in it. There are also problems happening with deleted records reappearing... but I'll start a new thread for that.

Help appreciated! Thankyou!