Manual portal sorting like Netflix

[mklar]

I want to be able to sort the rows of a portal manually.

If you happen to be a member of Netflix, in order to manage your queue, you rank the movies you want to see in the order you'd like them sent to you. You get an ordered list of every film in your queue with an editable field pre-populated with its current numerical position in the list. For example, if I wanted to move "The Big Lebowski" from position 9 to position 1 in my queue, I'd replace the "9" with "1" in that editable field and hit submit. "Lebowski" jumps up to the top and the previous number 1 film drops to number 2, while the previous number 2 film is reranked to 3 and so on and so forth to number 9, after which all the remaining films do not change position.

I'd like to perform a similar sort in a portal so that when I manually change the value of the sorted-by field in a portal row the corresponding fields in the other portal rows change accordingly. There can't be any numbers repeated in the set of records in the portal. Any ideas on how to do this?

[Razumovsky]

Hi Mklar, welcome.

I just posted a sample file that allows you to custom order items in a portal using Xeno's paradox. It should accomplish what you want (or at least give you some ideas).

Cheers,

-Raz

[mklar]

That Xeno thing is a clever workaround to the way Filemaker handles portals, but I don't think it's going to work for me.

The Numbers are actually a crucial part of the puzzle here. The user must be able to see the numbers (which also determine the portal row order) as they have other meaning.

[Razumovsky]

The numbers are just the order they appear in the relationship, so all you need to do is get(recordnumber).

Reorder.fp7_2.zip