Refreshing Summary Field Elegantly?

[Wickerman]

Jeez -- I've gone 'round and round on this for the past hour. I have a portal displaying item records from a join table with an "Insurance Value" field accessible to the user to set $ values. Just below the portal I have a Summary Field that totals up the Insurance values. (I have it set up as a text Merge Field since its display only) Basically, it works. . .

But I'm struggling with the various ways that user behavior can make the Summary Field update itself . . . or not. If the user enters a value in a portal line item and clicks out onto the layout, the Summary field refreshes itself -- but if instead they tab to or enter another field directly, the Summary field goes blank.

I can create a "Refresh Window" button next to the Summary -- but I note it only works if the user isn't currently "in" another field -- is there a step I can add to the button script to get the cursor "out" of any field? (And is there a term for that?). Also, I tried variations displaying the Summary Field in a standard textbox as well as a merge field but in some solutions was getting an ugly 'flashing' effect-- as I say, I've been going around and around with various variations.

I'm realizing that my problem here exposes that I am lacking some underlying concept of how the FMP window works / committing records / refreshing windows etc. Could someone help me out here?

Thanks

Albert

[Søren Dyhr]

Summary fields are for subsummary reporting not for spreadsheet'ish behaviour except when positioned in the header og tailer of a layout, where instead the aggregate functions such as Sum( refreshes properly dispite allocation. However could the found set be of considerable size allowing only genuine summaries to evaluate, if we speak of pre fm10 should it instead be scripted to appear in Browsemode:

http://www.kevinfrank.com/download/kf-fast-summary.zip

However when speaking of a portal of data, would the aggregation function be sufficient - use Sum( over the relation!

--sd