display records in portal by date

[mmluon]

I'm new to filemaker and need some help getting unstuck.

I'm building a database for the school i work at and want to display the courses for a particular month (i.e.-for the month of October) in a portal.

How can i do this? I've tried a few different ways but now I'm just lost.

Thank you for your assistance

[Stomp]

Search the forum for "filter portal" and you'll turn up a lot of stuff. Basically, you want to add a couple of global fields in the parent table to hold a begin and end date, then setup the portal relationship like this:

Parent key = Child key

Global start date < Child date

Global end date > Child Date

Then populate the globals using whatever method you wish. There are other ways to do it, but this is pretty flexible.

[mmluon]

Thank you very much. I'll try it out.

I appreciate the friendly assistance.

Since I'll be the database administrator/developer for the school- my Filemaker knowledge will improve.

Practice makes perfect and you have to crawl before you can walk. :-)

[mmluon]

i'm still having a problem getting it to work.

I have tables for courses,clients,attendance,and invoices. The clients are billed at the beginning of the month for the previous month's classes.

The user clicks a button that goes to the invoice layout which collects the relevant data

I want to use a portal on the invoice layout to display only the courses being billed for the previous month.

so far i've figured this much out:

Invoice = parent / Attendance = Child

Tables related through Client ID

Gloabal fields - StartDate & EndDate - on Parent (thanks, stomp)

i'm having difficulty writing a formula needed to populate the global fields used to filter the portal.

This is my first Filemaker database and it's been going well up to this point but i think i may need a little hand-holding now to get me back on track. If i can overcome this hurdle- then i can have the solution finished in time for the coming school year. Please help with detailed instructions.

Also - Can anyone suggest good Filemaker reference or training books?

Thanks

[Fenton]

If you always want "last month", then the following works (result is Date):

1st day of last month:

Date(Month(Get(CurrentDate)) - 1; 1; Year(Get(CurrentDate)))

Last day of last month (old FileMaker trick, hopefully future also):

Date(Month(Get(CurrentDate)); 0; Year(Get(CurrentDate)))

or use (not tricky)

Date(Month(Get(CurrentDate)); 1; Year(Get(CurrentDate))) - 1

FileMaker is smart enough to adjust the year in Jan, so you get Dec of the previous year.

To be more flexible, you can use a global date field instead of Get (CurrentDate). Set it with your script. Adjust if desired.

You'd do the same for the Date field in the data, create a similar calculation field to use as the target of the relationship.