moving text from a portal to one text field

[Wing]

Hi, I currently have a portal that is pulling sample text from other records. Unfortunately, the number of records it pulls from and the amount of text it needs to show varies. This results in the sample text being cut off, or not show in the size portal I have. When printing these reports, there's lots of empty space to account for all the variations.

I thought a solution would be to have a field pull all the contents of the portal into one text field that I could then set to slide.

I assume it's like a calc field, but don't know how to properly write the script to achieve this. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

-wing

[RalphL]

It is best to print from the related table or in FMP 6 file. There is a plug-in the Troi Text Plug-in that has the function you want. Their web page is http://www.troi.com.

Edited March 21, 2006 by Guest

[BFrost]

If you want to avoid plug-ins, write a loop script which starts at the first portal record and sets your text collecting field (call it 'Collector' here) to whatever is already in 'Collector' concatenated with ( & ) whatever is in the portal record's text field followed by a "¶" mark; then go to the next portal record and do the same thing, exiting after the last portal record.

Make sure 'Collector' is empty before the loop begins.

If typography is subsequently involved, at the end of the collection replace double paragraph marks ("¶¶") and double spaces with singles so the typographer doesn't want to hurt you.

This can be quite sophisticated with formatting substitutions stacked up, tab and indent styles set in 'Collector', and SGML codes embedded for commercial typography applications. This is particularly useful for maintaining things like college catalog course descriptions, procedural manuals, and the like, which require ongoing revisions but always need to be current.

'Collector' can be global or not depending on the table context.