Value list editable by users

[Rigour]

I'm currently updating my office's filemaker 9 database, but am fairly new to filemaker and so I'm having a few issues. I'll explain what I need it to do, then I’ll get to what I have already done as I’m probably using a fairly backwards solution already.

What we have right now is a list of media contacts, each of whom are broken down by the kinds of publications they work for, and which clients they are relevant to. The final area we'd like to add is allowing them to be a member of a distribution list (DL). The DL list is constantly changing, depending on what press releases are circulating, so I’d like users to be able to modify the list of available DLs for them to add contacts to. I don’t want to let them modify the value list directly, as that opens up a dialogue with more options than I want them to have. The other big criteria is that I don’t want a user to be able to remove a DL from the value list that is currently being used by any of the records, I’d like them to be prompted to remove all contacts from that list first, or given the option to have them removed manually.

Right now what I have is essentially 3 records. "Distribution lists" is a text field that contains the DLs that a contact is currently a member of. This is a checkbox field, which pulls its value list from another text field "All Distribution Lists". "All Distribution Lists" is edited through a different layout, accessed though a button, and is an edit box that users may type in (keeping in mind they need to separate items on different lines). When this layout is opened, "All distribution Lists" is populated by the contents of my third record "Distribution Lists Global" This, as it sounds, is a global field that is used to store all the DLs so that all records have the same possible lists. When a user has made changes to the local record in "All distribution Lists" those changes are saved back into the global record. This way when they go to edit another record those changes will essentially be passed over from previous edits on other records. I've had to do this since apparently global records can’t be the source for a value list.

What I have described above surprisingly works quite well. I have even been able to run a check against the DLs that are in use on the local record, so if you try and remove a DL that is being used by the same record you are on when editing "All Distribution Lists" a warning shows. However I have not been able to find any way to run a check against all the other records.

It's not a huge issue if it isn't possible. I'm also open to total revamp of how I have things set up, just be gentle, I’m new to all this :. I’ve seen people getting value list contents from table data, but no really clear explanations on how to do this. I’m sure that using this I could do some sort of relationship wizardry, but again, I’ve not been able to find any thread really spelling out how to do this (and trust me, I’ve been using this forum extensively to get me this far!!)

Any help majorly appreciated, I'm happy to provide any other detailsfiles if needed.

[bcooney]

Here's a quick demo of what I'd do. Check it out and ask questions.

DistributionList.fp7.zip

[Rigour]

Hey,

Thanks so much for that. I'm starting to get my head around what you've done, looks like the only thing I'm not familiar with so far is the portal control you used to assign contact to lists. I'll have a look at this over the next couple of days and let you know how I go, but I'm pretty sure I'll be able to adapt it into what I'm doing. If I get unstuck I'll be sure to post,

thanks!

[bcooney]

Good. Meant to mention that I've layered two fields in the portal. The bottom is a popup with allow entry in Browse. This uses the value list of Active dist lists. The top field is a non-enterable related field dist list name. Because you still want to display a dist list name, even if you've later decided to inactivate it.