"Complicated" Report

[FM_n00b]

I have a DB with 9 tables, all related by Name and Year.

I would like to produce a report that pulls all records from all nine tables that match a Name and ID that i enter, but I am having trouble doing this without the use of portals (which I cannot use because you have to specify their length, and some names have more results than others so this causes problems when printing).

Should I be using 9 subsummary parts, one for each table and then have all of the fields that i want outputted in the body? All I have been able to produce is a report of the FIRST record from each table that matches the name. I feel like this must be easy to do, some help would be greatly appreciated!

Here is an example of the output I would like to achieve:

Name, Year

Table1

Record 1

Record 2

Table2

Record 1

Record 2

Record 3

Record 4

Table3

Record 1

etc..

Edited July 30, 2009 by Guest

[comment]

What are the columns in this report? And incidentally, what are the 9 tables, and why aren't they one - if they need to be reported together?

[FM_n00b]

Ok so the tables (sorry it's 8 not 9) and columns that i need in the report are:

Instructional Activities

-Name

-Year

-Course

-Description

-Term

Supervision

-Name

-Year

-Student Supervised

-Type of Student

-Start Date

-End Date

Committees

-Name

-Year

-Committee

-Department

-Role

-Degree

Grants

-Name

-Year

-Agency

-Type

-Amount

Publications

-Name

-Year

-Type

-Title

-Journal

-Citation

Presentations

-Name

-Year

-Type

-Category

-Citation

Staff

-Name

-Year

-Position

-Office

-Department

Activities

-Name

-Year

-Special Contributions

-Citizenship

-Research

-External Service

This is a database for professors at a university. There are many reports that I need to produce from this data, but this is the only one that needs to pull information from all of the tables. This is not all in one table because a member of faculty may teach 5 courses, publish in 20 journals and supervise 8 students in one year, while another may teach one course, not publish anything and supervise two students.

[mr_vodka]

FileMaker does not provide the ability to do UNIONs. You can take your various found sets and import the records into a temp table to give you what you need though.

[FM_n00b]

so my Temp table would contain all of the possible fields that I might want to print in the report, and i would create a script that goes to each layout, performing finds and importing records to that table, perhaps setting another field to a layout_ID and then produce a report based on layout_ID?

[comment]

I'd suggest you try something simple first: place 8 portals on the layout, and set each to have the maximum numbers of rows that can be ever expected (you will need a very tall body part for this). Select all the portals and set them to slide up, also reducing the size of the part. Go into Preview mode and see how bad it is.

Any other way is going to be much more complex, since each part has different number of columns, with different headings - and presumably different width requirements.

[FM_n00b]

comment: THANK YOU!

i already had it set up with a bunch of portals but i didn't know that you can set the portals to slide up, which is why i was trying this method!

problem solved, sorry for the redundant post guys!