Displaying portals within portals

[Rapt Productions]

Hello. I am trying to create a project management database for my company. I had planned to set up tables as follows

[color:yellow]................company[color:yellow]...................phone number

[color:yellow]............./[color:yellow]................[color:yellow]............../

Project[color:yellow].......................contact - email address

[color:yellow].............[color:yellow]................/[color:yellow]..............

[color:yellow]...............personnel[color:yellow]..................mailing address

I created the contacts, phone numbers, mailing address, and email address tables, and created a relationship between contact and the three other tables using FirstName = FirstName and LastName = LastName. I created portals under contact to show the multiple phone numbers, email addresses, and mailing addresses, and I thought everything was going great. Then I started trying to create the company table and realized that I didn't know how to proceed. I was hoping there was a way to create a portal in companies where I'd enter the first and last name and it would show me the portals that were showing up for that name within contacts. But I can't create relationships between the contents of portals, right? Am I going about this the wrong way? Does any of this make any sense?

Thank you for your time!

Edited December 4, 2008 by Guest

[aldipalo]

I do not believe you can create a portal within a portal. You can, however, place a portal within a list layout or multiple portal in a form layout.

Btw, it is generally considered better to relate tables by ID#. If you set up your relationships based on Names and there is a name change all the relationships to that contact will be lost, additionally, if you have two people with the same name your relationship will fail. The same goes for company names as well.

Edited December 5, 2008 by Guest

[pacific707]

first just a tip don't use names first and/or last as relationships use a self generated serial number field this allows for people to have the same name.

there is a way to do this "kinda".

If I understand you correctly you want to show the contact record including the phone number and emails ect in a portal.

you will need a plugin such as zscript that trigers scripts on the change of a field.

on the table contact there is a portal showing phone numbers i assume. you need to use the zscript plugin to run a script every time a phone number is entered or changed. This script will keep a number system of phone numbers up to date.

Your phone# table should have a field called rank or something. this field will number each phone number a person enters. so if they add one the field will be 1 if they add another it will say 2 ect. the reason you need a script is if someone removes a number it will need to reorder the numbers for a contact so there is no missing numbers.

On your portal showing contacts leave room for a couple of phone numbers maybe 3. Then make that amount of instances of the phone number table. make 3 calculation fileds that are global on the contact table that calculate to 1, 2 and 3. this will determin what number will be pulled through the relationship. put a little button on the portal that adds 1 to each field and one that minuses 1. this will allow it to work like a mini portal.

its quite complicated and may be more easy to just have a button to show the contacts full info in a small layout that pops up.