Interacting with display of all field's contents

[Bri2008]

What is a good way to display *all* of a field's contents automatically and be able to then select options and interact with another table's information?

Two examples of the kind of thing I'm trying to figure out with FM8.5, but not grasping yet: 1) a school database with classes, hundreds of students, and the goal of keeping track of progress on academic goals for each student. 2) A sales database with sales regions, stores, hundreds of managers, a product line offering, and the goal of keeping information about where each manager is in the process of deciding what products they might carry.

In each case there could be hundreds of students or hundreds of managers, but I don't want in the layout to have to go through the tedium of manually selecting each single student or each individual manager to display, instead I'd like to have them already displayed (arranged say clustered by class or sales region, and then alphabetical) in the layout, and then be able to have checkboxes or popups or text entry with fields coming from other tables.

I realize there will be a lot of one-by-one selection of relations initially between each table (which class each student is in, or which region each store is in, for example), and I think I have a decent handle on setting up stuff like that now, but most example demo databases I've looked at only seem to show that one-by-one relationship making layout set-up.

How would a knowledgeable person go about making a layout that automatically shows all the students in one class, or all the store managers in a region, that would let users make selections or relations from other tables fields?

[Søren Dyhr]

Not sure if it's good, but some of it might be useful:

http://www.jonathanstark.com/downloads.php#single_table_join

--sd

[Bri2008]

Thank you Søren, I've started to look over the button scripting and the relationships, and that solution looks very elegant - lots I can learn from it.

I'm thinking maybe what I need to do is make a layout with a table view, and play around enough with the demo you linked me to understand how to deploy some of its interesting features.

This forum is wonderful, I've learned a lot already from browsing it and seeing what people are trying, but I particularly appreciate your reply.

Brian