Ho to show all records at one time

[sahadev]

Hello,

I'm a relative newbie to FMP, so please bear with me. I'm stumped at what seems to me to be a very basic level. Any help will be appreciated.

I'm building a DB to manage purchase orders for plants at the landscaping company where I work. All we have at the moment is FMP 4.0, which may be part of the problem.

I'm trying to create a layout that will show a list of plants for a job, plus the related info, and then save it as a file for future reference. My problem is getting the layout to display all of the records for that job at one time. I need to do this so I can work with the data. In layout mode I've tried copy/paste, control+drag and duplicate fields, but that just shows multiple instances of the current record. Repeating fields doesn't sound right either, as I will need to sort, lookup and summarize this data.

How do I do this?

Also, when I create new records, I use a related field to get the names of the plants from another file. 95% of the time this works great, but occasionally the plant I want will appear in the drop down list, but after being chosen it does not display in the form. The record is created, but the plant name never appears. The plant names on the drop down list immediately above and below the desired name will display if chosen, but not the one I need. Why would it do this?

Thank you for your help...Sahadev

[Fitch]

To show all records for one job, use a list layout and do a Find for that job number.

Another method would be to show related records in a portal. However, since you say you want to sort and summarize, a list would be easier to work with.

As for the problem with your drop down list, you may have a duplicate ID number in your product file, or there may be an invisible character such as a space that causes a mismatch.