Printing Portals

[Gilad]

What is the preferred solution for printing after going through so much effort to create a good portal?

Thanks to the advice on this forum, I have created a marvelous filtering portal based on several criteria and am preparing to implement portal sorting with three sort parameters (“based on kitchen sink too” - David Kachel). Great! But now I need a printing scheme. Portals are “not supposed to be” used for printing but I went to so much trouble to create my portal! I really need to use a portal rather than a standard list or table view because of the “Tab” constraint.

Do I need to freeze view, grab the filtering criteria as variables, enter find mode, set the find criteria and create a found set from which to print via a list view? Even then, what about the user defined sorting? These limitations would seem to make the portal filtering option less attractive except for small bits of data.

Thank you in advance!!!

[Lee Smith]

You should create your report in the file where the data resides.

HTH

Lee

[Gilad]

Thank for your response. The portal acts as mulit-criteria filter based on a global field with a self relationship, all within the same table.

Of course I can use a standard find and create a report directly but I am trying to take advantage of the great features of portals. There are currently 80K records and I need to set certain users by defalult to look at only a subset of the data...so this type of filtering is ideal if not required.

Gilad

[comment]

I may be missing something here, but it seems to me you can combine the best of both by viewing in a portal, then use Go to Related Record (Show related only) to create a found set and print it.

[Gilad]

Thank you. I am humbled by such an obvious solution!

Now I must work on preserving the portal sort order in the new related found set...?

Gilad

[comment]

If you can move the sort order from the portal definition to the relationship definition, Filemaker will take care of this for you.

I don't think this is documented, but my tests show that if the button is placed in a portal, the related records will be sorted by that portal's sort order. If the button is outside any portal, the related found set is sorted by the relationship's sort order.

[Gilad]

The found related records set keeps the portal sort order when the button is placed in the portal!

The combination of multicriteria portal filtering, sorting on the fly and the abiltiy to report on the data exactly as it is sorted in the portal...Filemaker Heaven.

Gilad