Two Portals Within a Layout

[BPT]

Hi all,

Relatively new to this but am slowly catching on. I've created a database to record a group of people and their involvement in a series of projects. I have a table of People, a table of Projects, and a join table of Interactions, which records the two foreign keys and information about each individual person-project interaction. This all seems to work fine, including the relationship between the three.

The trick comes in when I attempt to divide the interactions into two categories. A person can be involved in a project in one of two ways (Staff or Volunteer) and can change type from project to project. On the Project layout, I'd like to have two portals, one that lists all of the Staff for that project and one which lists all of the Volunteers. If I create a field in Interactions, I know how to sort by type, but I can't figure out how to actually have two, filtered portals.

Any help would be MUCH appreciated!

Thanks!

[bcooney]

Here's a demo of a filtered portal. Rather than hard-code two portals, one for each type of staff.

If you want two portals, perhaps one each on a tab panel, you would create a calc field in Projects that = typeID. Then create two relationships to Interactions from projects, each with projectID and the respective typeID.

Welcome to the forums!

PopupFiltPortal.fp7.zip

Edited January 10, 2010 by Guest

[BPT]

Thanks so, so much for this. I see what you've done with the filtering. Is there a way, then, to display the two lists simultaneously but separately on the same layout?

How do you create two relationships without needing a second table occurrence (and thus a separate layout)?

[bcooney]

A table occurrence does not = a layout. Layouts are based on TOs, but you'll probably end up with many TOs that are not the basis for a layout.

To display two portals instead of one that filters, you need two TOs for Interactions: Interactions~staff and Interactions~vol. These TOs will be used for the portals.

I described above how to create the "hard-coded" type relationships.

Edited January 10, 2010 by Guest

[BPT]

Thanks for bearing with me.

My trouble is that if I create two TOs for Interactions, then I get a cycle with People and Projects on either side, both connected to each of the Interactions TOs. Filemaker doesn't allow this and requires that either People or Projects have a second TO as well. But because people can be involved in more than one project in both types of roles, they must stay at one TO, right?

Or is there a way, within one layout, for two portals to look at Interactions via two different TOs for Projects?

Edited January 10, 2010 by Guest

[comment]

Your core relationships:

Projects -< Interactions >- People

Your two filtered relationships:

Projects -< Interactions 2 >- People 2

Projects -< Interactions 3 >- People 3

If you like, you can eliminate People 2 and People 3 by adding calculation field/s in Interactions to pull the data from People.

[BPT]

Wouldn't I then need

Projects 2 -< Interactions 2 >- People

Projects 3 -< Interactions 3 >- People

to accomplish the converse?

What do you mean by adding calculation fields to pull the data? Still getting used to terminology.

[bcooney]

Another demo. Look into the Anchor Buoy method. This is an approach to the relationship graph that helps you name TOs.

TwoPortals1.fp7.zip

[comment]

Wouldn't I then need

Projects 2 -< Interactions 2 >- People

Projects 3 -< Interactions 3 >- People

to accomplish the converse?

Only if you wanted to show two portals on a layout of People: a portal of projects where the person is staff, and a portal of projects where they volunteer. And then it would need to be:

Projects 2 -< Interactions 4 >- People

Projects 3 -< Interactions 5 >- People

What do you mean by adding calculation fields to pull the data? Still getting used to terminology.

What Barbara did in the last demo with Interactions::Name_c.

[BPT]

That's it! Thank you, thank you, thank you!!