portal not displaying what I think it should

[denno]

I am setting up a new database for tracking lecture evaluations. Each month, 5 lectures are scored on each evaluation form that is turned in by that month's group of students. (The eval form lists the 5 lectures and there's a score assigned for each one.)

I created a table for evals and a table for lectures. They are related by month. Evals has a fields LECTURE1, LECTURE2, etc. Lectures has the month, speaker and topic.

I need to display each speaker's scores for their particular topic. I created a Calc field in Lectures called SCORE that uses Case function to display the score from the corresponding lecture.

I then created a portal in Lectures to display the SCORE field. I thought this would display the corresponding scores for the lecture that month, but instead it displays the same value in all the rows and for all the different lectures.

Hopefully all this makes sense--any help would be appreciated!

[Søren Dyhr]

This confuses me ever so slightly:

Evals has a fields LECTURE1, LECTURE2,

Why the postfixes, should have be broken out in individual records!!!

--sd

[denno]

I totally agree--unfortunately the eval form was created before I got involved

[Søren Dyhr]

Expecting easy statistics on a less than normalized structure - is far fetched to say the least. But you are the developer of the solution behind an apparent non negotiable established layout, but you should think of the posibilities of cutting up a portal.

Now when cutting up will entering something in an arbitrary portal row be a little counter intuitive to the user, but if you prefab the rows when ever you make a new evaluation via internal import can a cool autoenter functionality discovered by Daniele Raybaudi be utilized.

Unfortuantely is it a scripted matter so, the creation of a new evaluation scheme should either be tied to a button, or the menu should be intercepted to take the scripted record creation instead of the native. But only an advanced/developer version of filemaker pro allows you to do that.

But you can study the idea, by dissection my attachment, where the use of the button is manditory!

--sd

lectureEvals.zip

[Fenton]

The fact that a layout must look a certain way does not mean that you cannot use a proper relational structure to produce the same thing. As Søren's file shows, portals can be started at different rows, if you need space between the rows, or some other arrangement on the layout.

So Lecture1, Lecture2, etc., can be a single field in their own table, 5 records. The only problem is moving the existing data, which is just 5 imports, one for each field, each import including the month/year and the StudentID.

[denno]

thanks for the assistance!

Would mind explaining the Breaker field? I'm afraid I don't understand the formula behind it.

Edited October 29, 2007 by Guest