I cannot figure out a way to accomplish what I think should be a fairly simple task. I have a portal with varying numbers of records (actually products) for each customer record. Above the portal I have a summary field (actually a Count of products) that I want to be able to use in Find Requests - e.g. find all customers with 10 or more products. It appears as though Find Requests are not valid on Summary Fields in FM8. I have tried using a Calculation field as well (Get(FoundCount)) but this also does not appear to work. I have also tried creating a field that looks up the value of the Count and attempted a Find Request on that field. No luck. Am doing something wrong or is there another way to approach this?

Although it's search on an unstored field, shouldn't it be a summaryfield that tells you how many items an invoice contains, but instead a Aggregate function looking across a relationship, here Count( ... well as you have seen is it posible to watch real summary fields, but not to search it. But developers tends to treat it as undocumented feature - that has it freshing issues.

But as the database grows in size, will this kind of search in unstored aggregate fields grow tiresom to wait for, so a scripted adding of lines to the portal via a scratchpadish interface are a cure for making this field indexable, so each time a record is changes is it conveyed back and forth to the scratchpad, and all required sums are freshend when these actions take place.

Other measures exists, such as lookup last, but they're often jeopadized by broken sequences.

But what you have to realize here is that the data you wish to get perhaps NOT belongs to the invoice as document, but instead as a dedicated reporting procedure, where the foreignkey is breaker for summary report - Pulling in the customers name to generated report could utilize the bidirectionaly now posible with fm-version beyond fm6.

--sd

I think I understand what you are talking about. I was trying to accomplish all of my needs in a nice, compact interface. Doing what you suggest in a separate report using scripts is possible but not ideal.