Many-to-many via portals

[Owen Mathews]

I hope I'm overlooking the easy solution... If I have a many-to-many relationship (my sample has articles and contributors), how do I set up a layout that allows for easy linking of the two? That is, I have a layout based on Articles that has a portal from Contributors, and I want to be able to create the relationships by clicking in the portal and choosing the contributors to the article. This doesn't seem to work across two hops in the relationship diagram. I click on the portal row and because the field is from a table not directly related to Articles, no record is created, and I can't display a drop-down list.

I think I understand why, but surely there's some way to do this simply? I want a nice drop-down list when I click into the next empty portal row so I can choose a contributor and associate it with the article and have the join row created automatically for me. Ideally this would involve little to no scripting or buttons, but I'm flexible.

Any ideas?

Articles.zip

[John Mark Osborne]

I have attached the modified version of your file. I changed the value list as well as the field displaying in the portal. Enjoy!

Articles.fp7.zip

[Raybaudi]

So ?

Articles.zip

[Owen Mathews]

Thank you both! Color me impressed, relieved and somewhat confused.

That is a bit non-intuitive, the way it works... Why does a pop-up menu seem to correctly display the name, but a drop-down list display the (hidden) ID until it actually drops down? Bug or feature?

I'm glad to find such an easy solution.

[John Mark Osborne]

It's a feature that pop-up menus can hide the real value being entered into the field.

[dave's not here]

I'm trying to apply Chuck's instructions about duplicating the portal data to your example http://www.fmforums.com/forum/showtopic.php?tid/1463/post/77293, but haven't been successful. Your example is great BTW. Is the contributors table the same as his 'child file'? I've attached my feeble attempt to get this working. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Duplicate.fp7.zip

[mr_vodka]

Dave,

As per your PM, take a look at the modified file for one method on duplicating records with child records.

Duplicate.zip