Extracting data from portals

[Meetloaf]

Is there a way to extract data from a portal, something as simple as text?

e.g. Let's say you have an employee's table and an

Orders table. One employee to Many Orders. Now let's say in the employee table you have a portal that shows all of the vendors that the employee has done orders for. And I want to get the names of each vendor (from the portal) so that I can use them in a form letter.

Any help is great. Thanks.

[Lee Smith]

The portal is just a view of the data from for files via relationship. You should be able to get the data using the relationship, but the question come to mind that this sounds like you are about to duplicate data, instead of using the built-in tools for seeing the data in other layouts.

Maybe if you tell us why you need to grab the data, we can be a little more specific on how to do what you want.

HTH

Lee

[Inky Phil]

Notwithstanding Lee's good advice, I have in the past used the following script to do what you have asked

Go to portal row (select,first)

Set field (aglobal;portal relationship::Vendor)

loop

Go to portalrow(select,next,exit after last)

Set field (aglobal;aglobal& :paragraph: &portal relationship::Vendor)

endloop

commit record

That will give you all the vendors in your portal in a list in aglobal but as Lee said that isn't necessarily the best way to achieve what you want. I posted it only because I happened upon it almost at the same time as I viewed your post

Phil

[Meetloaf]

Allrighty, you asked for it

I hope this doesn't get too confusing.

I am creating a database that manages Scholarship Applications and Fundings for the Education Dept. at my university. I'm not necessarily trained to do so, but it's become my little brain-child. Anywho, here's what I am trying to accomplish:

Scholarships------Awards>---Applications>---Applicants

PKs

Scholarships = Account #

Award Allocations = Account #/Award ID

Awards = Award ID

Application = Application ID

Applicants = Student#

OK, I have one more table that is for Congratulations letters that relates to the Awards Table. Now, the nature of the scholarship awards is this. My department has stewardship over 50 endowment funds (Scholarships), each has a different amount of money available each year, and each has different criteria the recipient must meet. At times, any given account may not have enough money in it to fully fund an award, and so two awards are used. I anticipate the as many as 4 or 5 Scholarships can be used to fund a single award. That is what my Award Allocation does, it holds information about how much money was used from a certain account, to fund a certain or part of a certain award.

Now, having explained that (hopefully), we send a Congratulations Letter to each recipient. In the case that their award was funded by multiple Scholarship Funds (scholarship account #), we historically send them a letter for each account, and how much comes from that individual account. This was wasteful because some recipients were receiving several letters.

So, what I am trying to do, is send out ONE letter regardless of how many different scholarship accounts are used to fund the Award. What I was planning on doing was creating a field that would automate all of the formatting (commas, "and's", spaces, etc.) that would come into play since I'd like the field to be dynamic. Also, I do not want a script to run, since in the future, users of the database will likely have no clue what a script is, and I do not think I will be around for a very long time to fix things or help out.

Now, again I hope that was clear enough for you to get an idea of what is going on.

Thanks for helping me out so far

Adam

[Meetloaf]

Hello, just wanted to update and let you know I've found a solution.

GetNthRecord...since only 1-5 accounts will ever be used, I just hard-coded each account to be a text field on the Awards table [e.g., GetNthRecord (Award Allocations::ScholarshipName ;1)], now I just have to work on merging/formatting them with a gnarly 'ole conditional statement. Thanks for your help!