Making a filtered portal show all records, truncation

[polarpro]

Hey everyone.

I put a filtered portal on a layout; in the global filter field the user can key in his search term and gets a list of appropriate records. Works great. Two questions:

1. I’d like to make it possible for the user to show all records. The only thing I can imagine at the moment is to put a separate button next to the filter field attached to a script like „show records from the not filtered table“ (= the one that is the basis for the self-join).

2. To make it possible for a user to key in just the first few letters of a record’s title (truncated, like in find mode), I set up my relational key to the filter field like

Left ( Title ; 1 ) & "¶" &

Left ( Title ; 2 ) & "¶" &

Left ( Title ; 3 ) & "¶" &

Left ( Title ; 4 ) & "¶" &

Left ( Title ; 5 ) & "¶" &

Left ( Title ; 6 ) & "¶" &

and so on...

So, when the users keys in fu he receives fully, also when typing in ful or full.

This works quite well, I just wonder: Is this really best practice? Seems to make my database quite large, as I have to go all the way to Left ( Title ; 40 ).

Thank you for your input.

Mike

[Ocean West]

Explode Strings / words... can work

http://www.briandunning.com/cf/36 or http://www.briandunning.com/cf/586

you can use a wild card * to show all records just code that in to the key field in the related table.

In your related table, create a calc field:

cTitle: "*" & ExplodedString ( Title )

Then in your interface table (where your portal is) a global field where they enter the text.

you can relate this to cTitle

If you type in a * it should show ALL Records. if you type in a few letters it should filter.

another option http://www.filemakermagazine.com/videos/power-filterting-for-portals.html

[polarpro]

Hey Stephen:

Thanks so much for pointing these out! Exactly what I was looking for.

I tried Matt Petroysky’s solution, and it works really good, without the additional load of calculated data.

As for the * and Matt’s solution, they don’t work together (at least not the way I tried it).

But I’ve found another way out for this. Given are these fields:

gSearchFieldStart (this is where the user keys in what he’s looking for)

gSearchFieldEnd = gSearchFieldStart & "zzzz" (the user cannot see this field)

and this self-relationship:

gSearchFieldStart <= Title

gSearchFieldEnd >= Title

So, if the user enters ca he’ll find for example cat, as this lies between ca and cazzzz.

What I found is that when you enter a letter followed by ¶ and then hit the Enter key, it returns all following records. So a¶ finds a list with all entries from a… to z…

Thanks again,

Mike