Need help with summaries in portals

[jenatjax]

I am creating a FM7 database to manage projects handled by our in-house design group. I'm using portals to capture time and materials used on each job record, and creating an invoice layout that uses copies of those same portals to show what resources were used, along with the associated costs. Since both billing and time data need to appear on the same single page invoice, and the number of records in the portals usually exceed the available space, I would like the portal to return a summary of the total quantity of items used (per item) or the hours worked (per staff member). It currently looks like this (sorry 0 the html post is killing the spaces - name is in one column, hours in another):

Staff member Hours

Jane 1.50

Ed 0.50

Jane 0.25

Jane 0.25

Ed 0.25

What I want it to return is this:

Staff member Hours

Jane 2.00

Ed 0.75

Make sense? It seems that this would be a fairly simple thing to do, but I've tried all kinds of different ways and have come up with nothing. Do any of you brilliant FM types have any suggestions? Help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Jen

[mr_vodka]

This should help you... It is built for 8 but the concept should still be ok for 7 I believe.

Dynamic Summaries

Edited April 8, 2008 by Guest

[jenatjax]

Thanks for this - It does look like it woud help with what I need to do. I tried to open it, however, and it won't open with FM7. Do you know if there is a version for 7? I didn't see one...

[comment]

That demo uses v.8 specific features, namely the GetNthRecord() function. You can still achieve your goal by producing the report from the billing items table, with sub-summaries for:

Invoice

- Type (Material or Labor)

-- Staff Member