Another Multi-Table, One-Layout question

[jimmy176]

New User, First Post. I'm a writer who compiles home-improvement projects into books. I've been collecting projects over the course of a year in FM, and now I'm ready to output.

I have several tables (projects, clients, tools, steps, materials) that are all related, and my input layout works great. Project name and description, with tabs for Materials, Tools, and Steps, the tabs display portals of the other tables.

Now, I need to print a "one-sheet" with the Project, Tools, Materials, and Steps. I can't figure out how to do this, since each entity can have anywhere from 1 to 40 entries. Is there a way to have auto-expanding sections that repeat for each record (like the "BODY" now) for different sections and different tables?

thanks

[mz123]

You could add portals to your layout... but you'd have to overestimate the number of portal rows and the length of the text fields in the portal row. Then add Sliding (Format > Set Sliding/Printing...)

Do each of the tables have 1-40 records or is there one table that would have that many? If the latter you could create a layout for the table with the most layouts and make the shorter # of related records come from portals.

[Vaughan]

It's easiest to have each section on a separate page (ie, layout) and script the print job.

Go to Layout [ First page Layout ]

Print

Go to Layout [ materials ]

Print [ no dialog ]

Go to layout [ clients ]

Print [ no dialog ]

No it's not necessarilty ideal, but it's easy.

[surfsidepgs]

This is my problem too. I have a table for Newsletters which has portals to NewsItems and UpcomingEvents. I want to print this week's newsletter with the variable number of NewsItems followed by a variable number of Upcoming Events. This is the same thing you are trying to do, but I have less tables. My work around at the moment is to have 2 additional fields in Newsletters that I fill by looping through the related NewsItems (and then UpcomingEvents) and adding them to a variable (formatted a bit with the TextStyleAdd function) which becomes the whole of the NewsItems. I then print out the newsletter from the newsletter table with the newly populated fields. This seems like an inelegant hack and I'm sure there is a "proper" way to acomplish this. Anyone know?