Portal does not look up old records - only the new ones

[anja]

Hi,

I have the following problem. I have created two tables, one is "clients", one is "projects" - fairly simple. now, I have had the projects table before and now created "clients" after. I have linked the two through "client Id' and if I create a "project ID" field in clients, it shows one of the old project ID numbers. Now I created a portal to show all the projects that one client has. this portal, however only shows projects/ project ID's that are created after setting up the portal and not the ones that have been created a long time ago... a projects ID field however shows these older ID numbers. this makes me think that I have set up the right relationship but there is something wrong with the portal.

Can anyone help? does this even make sens?? thanks, Anja

[Jeff Albro]

I'm having the same trouble, and would love a clue. Any record created before I put the portal in is not visible in the portal.

I'm wondering if it could be an indexing issue?

-Jeff

[Fenton]

Maybe someone could post an example? You can remove whatever sensitive data. We only need to see:

1. Relationships

2. The ids of the records which are not showing, along with the id of their parent record

Basically, when relationships don't work, it's either because the relationship is not quite right, but even more likely that the data is not quite right; the Client ID in this case, I would think. It could also be miss-assigned fields in the portal, but then you'd likely just see duplicates.

You say, "when I create a Project ID field in Clients." I don't know exactly what you mean by this; a local calculation field based on the same relationship as the portal? You could also just put the related field on the layout. But I would be astounded (as likely are -) if a related field on the layout shows a related record that will not show in a portal using the same relationship.

Edited December 16, 2007 by Guest

[Jeff Albro]

See attached, Admin with no password.

Take a look at the form view of the Buildings layout to see what I mean.

I can't see for the life of me what I missed.

-Jeff

jalbro-missing-portal-entries.zip

Edited December 17, 2007 by Guest
edited for clarity

[comment]

You need to rebuild your index. Go to field definitions of the Floors table, and turn off the indexing for BuildingID (leave 'Automatically create indexes as needed' on).

[Jeff Albro]

That worked, Thanks!

So.... is the rule to leave indexing off, and let Filemaker create the index when needed?

-Jeff

[comment]

I don't know about rules, but it's the default setting and I usually leave it at that. But whatever the settings, it seems your file had a minor glitch and required a 'reset' of sorts. Hopefully there's nothing else wrong with it.

[LaRetta]

...it's the default setting and I usually leave it at that.

I'm quite particular about these settings since they can greatly affect the overall file size. If left as default (with auto indexing on) the file will continue to grow in size.

Many fields are never searched or sorted or required for relationships or value lists. It makes sense in these instances to change the setting to NONE and uncheck auto-indexing. For fields which are only keys, set to minimum and uncheck auto-indexing as well. In one solution (fm7 with 60 tables), just changing a few of these settings in 5 fields in my LineItems table (450,000 records), saved over 50 mb in file size. Overall, after optimizing and considering each field throughout my solution, I saved 100 mb in file size.

[comment]

I don't disagree, I just think such considerations should be reserved for experts.

However, I am curious how would a field with the default settings that is "never searched or sorted or required for relationships or value lists" become indexed.

[LaRetta]

Ah yes. It's because it is searched by the Developer when first designing it but not by regular users. That made me smile. I should have said, "sorted or searched RARELY." And sometimes I'll create a temp relationship to pull data through from other relationships when starting a design but remove them later so I clean up behind myself. :wink2: