I have three tables, call them Trips, TripRoster and Clients.

Relationships are set up properly with "allow creation of records via this relationship" permissions set. And in fact it all works fine in terms of displaying existing data. The problem is with creating new, related records.

In a layout for the top-level Trips table is a portal. The portal row contains the key field that relates Trips and TripRoster "tripRoster_ID". also are fields for the Clients table (first name, last name etc.)

When I click on the empty portal row to create new related records, it seems that no records are created until I enter data in a TripRoster field. So the auto-generated serial number (tripRoster_ID) displays nothing until date is entered in any TripRoster field, then the auto-gen serial # pops up. This is a hassle as the TripRoster table is a join table and I don't enter any data into that table directly, only through relationships.

Also no Client record (child of the TripRoster table) is created until the parent TripRoster record is created. So that means that the Client records (name,phone, etc.) can't be entered because no related record yet exists.

What I want to be able to do is enter the new portal row and simply enter the Client table data such as Name, Phone etc. But I can't do that until I manually enter some sort of data in the join table, TripRoster.

Perhaps I need to do this via an "Add New Client" button. Was having trouble with that method too -(

Perhaps there is just a resource I need to read on multiple related tables in portals.

I hope this all makes sense. Let me know if I'm not being clear.

Thanks!

I've toyed a little with your Hen/Egg problem, not that the result is a particular convenient way of dealing with data, but you can actually force the creation of records in several tables in a long line of TO's, by displaying the portal of the filtered TO in the very end of the path.

--sd

test.zip