Howdy:

I'm learning filemaker, and as an excercise I am creating a database to handle customers, products, and orders.

I have 4 tables:

customers (customer_id, customer_name, customer_address)

products (product_id, product_name, price)

orders (order_id, customer_id)

order_items (order_item_id, product_id, order_id)

So I'm trying to design a form to enter orders, and can't figure out how to set things up to allow me to enter multiple order items, without knowing how many order items there will be ahead of time. Is there a way to dynamically create additional fields in a form as items are added to an order?

I'm an absolute beginner, so if anyone can point me in the right direction, or someplace to read more about a possible solution, I sure would appreciate it.

thanks in advance,

cjl

There should be a zillion examples out there of what you are doing. You need to learn about portals; and about relationships which are defined to allow creation of new records. Oddly enough some of FileMaker's example files use repeating fields and you REALLY do NOT want to go that route.

One example file showing effective portal use is Time Billing, you will find it in your English Extras:Templates folder. The "parent" record is the Employee record and the "child" records are the charge lines for that employee. Lending Library also has a portal for auto-creating related records.

Thanks for the information.

I have learned a little bit about portals as you suggested, and they seem like the way to go for what I am trying to accomplish.

I have not been able to determine how the "Time Billing" template adds new records through the portal...any hints?

Thanks again,

cjl

Look at the details of the relationship definition by double clicking on the line or = symbol in the graph. When "allow creation of records in this table via this relationship" is turned on then you only need to start entering data in the blank row at the bottom of the portal and any field(s) in the relationship definition will be auto-filled from their match field.