I'm trying to use a portal and the Instant Web Portal (poorly named, could be confused with the field type portal).

Here is the situation; I have a layout with some text fields, then I have a portal that pulls from another FM file; up to 8 lines. When I view the database using the Instant Web Portal, if there are already records in the portal, they are displayed and the user can even add more.

However, when creating a new record, there is nothing that initiates creating a new record in the portal. Since Instant Web Portal is just HTML and data is entered and submitted, I can't insert a script to populate the first record. My portal fields are pop-up lists generated from value lists in the other FM file.

Has anyone else run into this? Seems to me, the solution is to somehow get the first record of the portal populated when a new record is created in the main table but I don't see how to do this. Any thoughts?

Try this: RelationName::fieldname.0 (row number of your portal)

This should insert/populate your record.

.1 = fist record

.2 = second record

.3 = so on and so on....

you could try using inlines to alter the second DB in the response file or in an inbetween format file with a meta refresh to the results format file.

It sounds like you're using instant web publishng, it has limitations (I've never actually used it) so you might think about building your own format files.