I have what must be a common need when creating reports. I need to be able to list all the items in a job and the hardware that goes with them. Easy enough. However, some of the items have hardware components and some don't. The two tables are Items and Hardware. When I join these two tables and create a report I am only able to retrieve those items that have hardware components. All items that do not have hardware are dropped from the report. It appears that Filemaker joins are all equal (=) joins.

How can I replicate the functionality of a left outer join in FileMaker? I need to be able to list ALL items, regardless of whether or not they have a hardware component.

Can't do this directly, but you can hack it.

What you do is you base the report on the Jobs table (slightly backwards obviously) and then place a portal of the hardware under the job. You size this portal to as many rows as you think will ever be used for one job. After that, you simply set Sliding / Printing options to automatically reduce the size of the portal based on data available (right click the portal and click sliding / printing) -- this "sizing" and "sliding" effect will only be visible in preview mode.

I've attached a sample for you to take a peek at.

Outer_Join_Report.zip

Many thanks!! I'll give it a try.