Hi,

Quick description first. I have a Loans database. There are three tables: Loans, Loan Line Items and Items. Loans has a portal to Loan Line Items which does a lookup to Items. Each Item has a status: Available, Not Available, Reserved.

Here is the question...as I enter an item in the Loan Line Items portal, is there a way to get immediate feedback as to the status of the item (beyond just having the field there). For instance, a dialog that says "This item is reserved you can't loan it" and then have the item removed from the portal?

What would be the best way to accomplish this behavior?

Thanks,

Matt

I think I would approach in another way, I would have two portal one of available items and one of chosen items, whether a chosen item is optional or not should it be strained from the availiable ones. This means the optional status only is an attribute of the reserved.

This could be done like this:

http://www.nightwing.com.au/FileMaker/demos7/demo703.html

--sd

Thanks I will take a look at that. The one thing I should have mentioned is that there are hundreds of items and the entry into the portal records would be done by barcode scanner. So the best case scenario would be: Scan an item...Filemaker says its not available OR Filemaker puts it in the portal.

Yes you should have, it changes it completely - this would make me reach out for conditional formating where I would redden the entries which collide via a selfjoin in the join-table where equal matches are made for the two foreignKeys, but the last one is theta on the join-records ID, making a match to another join record with a different ID.

--sd

Thanks for all the help Soren. If I could ask one more question, once the record is complete, is it best to have a script that makes sure the record does not get committed with reddened entries?

Now this isn't a validation, but merely a tagging showing the combination isn't unique ... but someone with experience with scanner might step in here??

--sd