Long Value Lists in Join Field

[Wickerman]

Hi -- I'm new to this site and looking forward to helping out where I can -- and hoping to get some help too!

Let's say I've got a table called Films and a table called Actors and I want to build an index of Appearances using a 'join field' by that name.

When I add a film record via the Films layout I plan to use a portal to the Appearances table to create the various apearances records. (Each film will have several actors, each actor will appear in many films). In the Appearances portal I have the foreign key field that links the join field records to the appropriate Actors' primary key. I have the field set to a pop-up menu making use of a Value list based on the primary key field from the Actors table -- and have the "Actors Name" field specified as the field to be displayed in the menu so the

user sees the Actor names, not meaningless ID#'s.

My question:

1) How do I make this interface more user-friendly given the very large number of actor names that will be included on the pop-up menu? WHen I try using a drop-down list that allows typing your way down the list by auto-completing, that works ok, but then the field displays the ID#, not the name, after you make the entry.

I'm guessing there must be a better way to approach this common issue? Should I perhaps be creating a separate window to pop up for assigning actors to films, and then just have the main layout display the actors via the relationship?

Open to any and all approaches!

thanks,

Albert

[comment]

You could have another portal showing all actors (or actors filtered by some criteria). Then have a script to create a new join record based on the current film and the clicked actor.