Selection Portal?

[habitude]

Howdy... Long time since I was here last, but hoping that one of the wizards here can help me nail this down.

Anyway, writing a solution that creates a simple work order and it includes the usual entities like

Contacts (or customer),

Service (instead of product),

Invoice, etc.

The majority of the contacts come from a variety of Real Estate offices, they call and request an inspection service on a home they are negotiating. Many times they will ask us to invoice an Escrow company, which brings me to the scenario...

Currently, to create a Work Order means locating that Contact (if they exist, is not creating a record for them first), and clicking the "Create Work Order) button.

Doing this creates a new record in Work Orders and pulls in the Contact info via lookups. (BTW, once in a while, that process will fail and only pull in the ID of the contact).

I want to create a selection portal that upon clicking a button like "Add Escrow?" will display a pop up window with a portal displaying available Escrow Companies/Escrow Officers on file. All the user needs to do is click on the invisible button in that row in the portal and it adds the info. If it's a new Escrow Company and/or Escrow Officer, have the ability to create that record as well.

Questions: Can this be done? Can it be done with the Work Order Requestor (Contact) also?

Is my thought process in the wrong direction?

Would appreciate any constructive ideas, thanks

Edited November 28, 2009 by Guest

[Matthew F]

You probably want your solution to copy over the information from you Escrow company directory to one or more specific fields on the work order. In this way the information on the work order will remain static after it is completed.

It should be possible to create a scripted button that does what you want, i.e. copy information from a portal row (Escrow companies) to the work order itself.

You might want to put the selection portal on a different layout. When the user selects an 'add escrow co.' button he will be taken to a selection layout. Then the invisible selection button adds the data to the work order and navigates back to the original work order layout.

Incidentally, you might not want to display the Escrow company choices in a portal. If your script takes you to a different layout, as I suggested above, then you can use the 'go to related records' script step to take you to a layout for the Escrow Company table in a list view.

[habitude]

Hey, sorry it took this long to reply... I like your suggestion but having a bit of trouble making it work.

Could you possibly elaborate a little more please?

[Matthew F]

Take a look at this. Its pretty simple.

WorkOrders.fp7.zip