Filtered Selection Portal

[Veronica]

I am using the filtered selection portal technique discussed in the book: Special Edition Using FileMaker Pro 8. (I wish I had the page numbers for you but the book is at work.)For the most part it works with minor but annoying problem.

Three tables: Personnel, Positions and Assignments; the are hundreds of personnel and hundreds of positions. I bring them together on the Assignments table. Because the user is likely to be in/on the Assignments TO for a length of time I've put the filter field and the portal of the Position TO directly on the Assignments TO.

The filter works perfectly in grouping all the positions of any 1 out of 11 programs in the portal.

I or the User, then select a portal row with the appropriate position code for that employee and click on an Assign button in that row which enters the recordID in the foreign key field of the Assignments TO. All well and good.

The annoying problem is that when I select a group in the filter field, it pulls and displays data from a record belonging to that group. Such as: the position code, position title, program and department. And, it repeatedly pulls the exact same data for every related record to that program.

When I "assign" the record ID to the foreign key field in the Assignments TO I would have expected that these fields would have changed to the data related to that record in the Position TO and be displayed in the Assignments TO.

There are several other related TOs which use this record ID from the Assignments TO and display the appropriate fields of data correctly. I don't understand why the correct field data does not display correctly in the Assignments TO.

The file is too large and too many TOs and too much real data to reference here but I hope my description is sufficient. Any ideas?

[Søren Dyhr]

repeatedly pulls the exact same data for every related record to that program.

This is usually because the portal shows the related from one TO and the fields from another TO of the same table. It can indeed be a little tricky to realize that you actually might have too few TO's - This relative lenghty movie explains whats goin on:

http://www.filemakermagazine.com/videos/graph-rules-four-rules-to-remember.html

--sd

[Veronica]

Soren, You have saved me again. It was a very helpful movie. You have my undying gratitude.

Veronica