I am a new user to filemaker and have used MS access extensively. I have a primary key of a table Called Dealer as a FK in a table called staff.

Now, in Access you can have a FK in a table that can be a drop down (listing all the pk's from another table, but the value displayed to the user is another field from the fk's table), but when they make a selection from that field the matching pk from the same table should be selected in the background.

I haven't found any help with this in the instructions that come with filemaker, the help is useless for this. I am wondering how I can do this in Filemaker, or is it even possible? There is no point in even having a relationship between two tables if you cannot select the various values from the fk's table.

I hope I explained my problem well enough, hope someone can help with this.

That was a problem in FM7 but in FM8, it has been resolved. Here's what you need to do.

In the "Specify fields for value list", select "Use fields from first field" and check mark "Also display values from second field", then make sure you have a check mark on

"Show values only from second field"

Well I tried that But I am still only getting the number displayed, although I do get the list of names from the Dealer table in the drop down.

The "display data from" field needs to have some field selected after I have already used the "display values from" selection otherwise it won't let me click on ok, and I only have two choices in that case. Either display the Foreign key field, or select to display the Name field from the Dealers table. In the second case it changes the value of name in the dealers table when I change the value in the field in the form, and in the first case it only displays the number even if I can select that by name.

I want the FK changed in the Staff table, but I want the form to display the matching name in the Dealer table for the FK in the Staff table, without changing any values in the Dealers table.

This is a formatting "feature" of FMP8. In order to show your second value on the layout(form)and still have the first value in the field you have to have the field setup as a Pop-Up Menu not as a drop-down list. I think you will then find that editing the name is not possible

Wow, that actually worked. Thanks for the help, I would have never thought to use a popup menu, and it works exactly the way I want.