Filtered portal relationships

[Jon Schlatter]

I have recently come back to developing in Filemaker and have hit a bit of a roadblock in relation to filtering portals properly. This is most likely a fairly common issue so please forgive me if this has been covered before...

I am currently building a project management system that is using a classic 'project to task' relationship between two tables. The tasks are associated using the project ID with no issues.

Becuase our projects contain a very large nuumber of tasks I would like to use a tabbed interface based on the project with a tab set aside for each task status. (I.e. requested tasks, active tasks, deferred tasks etc...)

When programming this type of interface in SQL/ASP.NET I would simply create a dynamic join that uses the status criteria for each tab when pulling the 'portal' contents. I looked in FM and see that I can specify multiple criteria joins and control the sorting, but I do not seem to get how to setup the filtering of the data based on the value of a specific field.

Any help with this is greatly appreciated.

Cheers!

Edited October 12, 2006 by Guest

[ThatOneGuy]

Hi Jon!

Welcome to the forums, and welcome back to FileMaker! :welcomesign:

Think in terms of having fields in your parent table that contain "constant" data for the filtered relationships you want to display. For example, fields to hold the "requested," "active," and "deferred" states you seek to filter. These fields can be global or auto-enter data fields. (In a multi-user scenario, you may need to take the files "down" to establish global values, then restart them on the server.... or I suppose you could make them global calculations.)

Anyway, on your Table Occurrence Graph, edit these filtering relationships so that you include a new "predicate" in the relationship where the Constant equals the Status of the child recoord. (You can also consider predicates where the Status does not equal a particular Constant if you want to "exclude" records of a particular state.) You're gonna love multi-predicate relationships if you haven't discovered them already!

Let us know how it's going.

[Jon Schlatter]

Thanks!

That gets me just where I need to go. I figured it was something relatively straight forward, just have to shift gears in my tactics using FM vs. the other tools I have been using...

Thanks again!

:yay:

[ThatOneGuy]

Thanks! That gets me just where I need to go.

Oh, that's great, and you're quite welcome, Jon!

When I read your well-articulated post, I thought you might only need a "nudge" to get you going. You proved me right!