Newbie Portal Design Question

[rebeccarizzo]

Hello,

I have a ton of Access experience, but just picked up Filemaker Pro last week. I would appreciate any help you can share.

I am developing a database for a law office, and what I want is to have one table that holds documents of various types that many different portals display depending on the document type. I have designed a layout with multiple tabs, each with a portal for a specific type of document. I figured out how to do it with different tables for each type of document, but one table and therefore one input interface would be nice. Is this something that FMP is capable of?

Thanks again for any input,

Rebecca

[comment]

A simple way would be to use ONE portal, with a relationship filtered by a global Type field. This can be made to look like tabs, if desired (selecting a "tab" sets the global field).

[bcooney]

Hi, Rebecca, welcome to FileMaker!

Yes, keep all the docs in one table, but use flag fields to differentiate among types.

Here's the setup. I have two doc types: Renewal, New Member. I have two fields in my Docs table, flag_IsRenewal and flag_isNewMember. These are number fields. Also create a field, "Constant" that is a calc field that equals 1.

Then, on your tab, to create a relationship for a portal of Renewal Docs on a layout that is based on a Docs table occurrence, Docs related to Docs Renewal where Constant=flag_isRenewal. Allow creation of related records in this relationship.

[rebeccarizzo]

I am not getting it. The global type field seems to be all the same number, which is not what I think I am looking for. If I change the number on one record, they all change to that number. What am I missing?

[comment]

If you define your relationship as:

Parent::ParentID = Child::ParentID

AND

Parent::gType = Child::Type

and enter "Contract" into gType, your portal will display children of the current parent whose type is "Contract".

[rebeccarizzo]

OKay, that made more sense. Thanks!!

[rebeccarizzo]

Hello again,

I was rereading your suggestion, and I saw that the layout needed to be based on the Docs table in your example, and I am unclear how to make that work with what I am trying to do.

Basically, I have a client info layout based on a client table, and at the bottom I want to put 10 tabs that all display different information about that client, most of which would talk to the Documents table, some talk to their own table. The easiest way to do that is to make a different document table for each type, but that seems large and sloppy to me. I was looking for a neater way to do it.

Again I appreciate your help,

Rebecca