I am working for a PBS station and currently I am working on putting our pledge activities in a database. For our TV pledges, I created a program table, a scheduling table and a program_premium table (a table between premium item and program). I join program table to program_premium table, then join program to scheduling table. The data entry works great. All you need to do is add a program record and add in the pledge breaks in a scheduling portal, then select the premium offer in the program_premium portal.

The problem is when I try to run a report to see what was offering and the date and time of pledge. I pull the records from program table. I use tow portals one for break and the other for premium offer. The break portal is fine since the data is simple, but when come to the premium offer. We need the pledge amount, premium code, short title (description) of the premium and description (long) field. I use merge fields for all the fields and slid up everything in the report. Problem is portal does not slid with field content. It will reduce the rows if there are no record but not the size of the portal. In other word, if the portal is set at four inches tall and the content of the text only requires two inches, the report still show as four inches high. In order to fit in all the description I need to make the portal large enough, but if I make the portal too big, I get a lot of white space with one portal row per page.

Does anyone have a better way to do this? If I don’t use portal then I can only see the first row of the portal.

If you are using FileMaker Pro 8, you should explore the GetNthRecord function to set the contents of a single field to the contents of the related records using a looping script.

The single field will slide into empty space while, as you have found out, portals won't.

I didn't quite follow your structure, but in general you should make the report from the join table - so that each individual row is a body on your layout.

I too have experienced the same problem in using portals. They don't slide, they don't adjust in size when rows change, and they aren't meant for printing. Some of us newbies could really use some step-by-step help in understanding how to use an alternative to portals when you want to show lists of entries especially for printing. Thank you.

I don't know about step-by-step, but here's a simple example that you can take apart. Note especially the layout parts and the use of related fields.

PrintInvoice.fp7.zip

Yes thank you. I have opened it. Thanks especially for directing me to the "parts". I will spend some time learning from it.