Relationships with repeating fields

[Siri]

The way I understand it, you can perform a relationship where you can relate to any of the values instead of all of the values by using a repeating field. (Please post any other way to accomplish this)

I have 2 tables one categories and one items. I'd like to be able to show a portal with items from more than one category based on someone choosing several categories.

I believe a checkbox field would do this and would place the selections in a repeating field?

But I really have too many categories to put in a checkbox list. I'd like to base the selection (and repeating field) on a yes/no button for each category in a portal.

I'm wondering if there is a way to do this.

[Robert Kidd]

Are you sure you only have two tables ?

I'm guessing that each item is assigned a single category. And that each item is related to a 3rd table and it's this 3rd table that you want to be able to view a subset of the related items from ?

BTW It wouldn't be a repeating field, it would be a text field with values separated by carriage returns.

I've included a demo filter of how to filter your records in the method you described. If you notice the checkbox options only include values which relate to that record, it may be that this would keep your checkbox options down to a manageable level ?

Test2.zip

[Søren Dyhr]

One point in this technique is to avoid the join table in a many2many relation - the advantage is that if the repeating field is a calc'field is it much faster than generating join-records and zap them again if the relationship changes.

Example a start and end data in one table, can produce a repeating field that links all other collapsing events in a selfjoin, since they carries a set of matchfields as well. Previously didn't we have the Get(CalculationRepetition) or fieldcontent sizes beyond 64K ...so a clever russian developer can up with this hashing algorithm:

http://www.onegasoft.com/tools/smartranges/index.shtml

That made it posible to stuff any kind of date range inside the bounderies of a odinary indexable field.

I'm using multilinekeys and repeating fields in vain here, since they shares funktionality. With the introduction of CF (custom functions) did it become posible to recursively to make a strainerlist wich is used in this template:

http://www.nightwing.com.au/FileMaker/demos7/demo705.html

But By and large is it same technique or variations on it.

--sd