I am stuck on creating a relationship in a printed music catalog database. I would appreciate any help you can give me.

This database tracks printed music. My desire is to create 1 layout and but view music titles with tab views and portals. An example is attached to this posting.

I want to view the portaled music with the following tabs.

Song Details

By Occasion

By Style

By Theme

Here are my tables

Songs

Occasion lineitem

Style lineitem

Theme lineitem

Note that each song can have more than 1 occasion, style and theme.

My questions is…can I develop this using only one layout and tabs, or am I going to have to use multiple layouts?

Thanks for your help.

You can do it with one layout and tabs. Search for filtered portal to find examples. Your relationships would look like this:

Base - line item A - songsA

Base - line item B - songsB

Base - line item C - songsC

"Base" is a single TO with the 3 rels hanging off of it.

Tom,

Would you please give me more details on how I would create the relationship. What do you mean by base?

Thanks

Base is just the Table Occurrence (TO) on which the layout is based. It is the "parent" table, the context of your portal. It could be your Songs table but it doesn't have to be, since the field you'll use for the relationship in this table will be a global.

From the base table you make a relationship to each of your line items tables. On each tab you'll put a portal based on one of these relationships.

Since what you want to show in the portal is the song name, you'll need a TO based on Songs for each of the line items relationships so you can show the song name in each portal. (Unless you're already storing the song name in each line items table, but that would be kind of silly.) You can ignore this part of the setup until you get the basic concept.

Go to Kevin Frank's site and have a look at the Simple Filtered Portals example.