I have two main questions. First, I have a Pond Info Master File that has portals to a Water Quality file, a Fish Info file, a Fecal Coliform file and 3 others. Due to space constraints, I only have one or two rows per portal. When I do a Find in the fields of a portal, say in the Fish Info portal for Category "Fish Kill" and Common Name "Grass Carp", I get results of every entry for that given pond, not just ones relating to Fish Kill. From the manual, I think I have gleened that there is no way around this but I thought I'd just make sure. Is there any way to conduct a find that only gets results for Fish Kill instead of Sampling, Stocking, etc also.

Secondly and most importantly, I'm wondering if there is a way to keep data in one portal from moving while you scroll through another portal. Say I scroll down to a particular entry in the Fish Info portal for a Fish Kill of Grass Carp on 1/27/95 and its the sixth record. Then I want to scroll through the water qualtiy data for that same time period. When I click in the Water Quality Portal to scroll through it, the Fish Info portal goes back to the first record which is not the one I want. Is there any way to keep the Fish Info portal static while I scroll through the water quality?

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Originally posted by NormShea:

I have two main questions. First, I have a Pond Info Master File that has portals to a Water Quality file, a Fish Info file, a Fecal Coliform file and 3 others. Due to space constraints, I only have one or two rows per portal. When I do a Find in the fields of a portal, say in the Fish Info portal for Category "Fish Kill" and Common Name "Grass Carp", I get results of every entry for that given pond, not just ones relating to Fish Kill. From the manual, I think I have gleened that there is no way around this but I thought I'd just make sure. Is there any way to conduct a find that only gets results for Fish Kill instead of Sampling, Stocking, etc also.

Secondly and most importantly, I'm wondering if there is a way to keep data in one portal from moving while you scroll through another portal. Say I scroll down to a particular entry in the Fish Info portal for a Fish Kill of Grass Carp on 1/27/95 and its the sixth record. Then I want to scroll through the water qualtiy data for that same time period. When I click in the Water Quality Portal to scroll through it, the Fish Info portal goes back to the first record which is not the one I want. Is there any way to keep the Fish Info portal static while I scroll through the water quality?

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I think that you mistake is that thinking you are performing a find on the related data. The portal is showing the related data, but your find is being performed on the current file. In this case you are finding "Ponds" that match the "Water Quality" criteria that you entered.

It sounds to me like you want to be doing some portal filtering. Meaining that the data that is shown in the portals gets refined by some criteria that you enter.

This is a relatively complex subject, but I suggest looking on www.databasepros.com as John-Mark has some example files on this subject.

I can also give you some examples:

Let's say that you normally relate on PondID. To do filtering you create a series of filter fields (these are the fields that will store your filter criteria). Makes these globals, and each one will be used to store a specific type of criteria (i.e. gFilterPH, gFilterProblem, gFilterFishType, etc). You then create a calc field (in both the Pond as well as related files) which will combine your PondID and the filter criteria:

PondID & "-" & gFilterPH

PondID & "-" & gFishType

And so on. You then use these fields to make your relationships.