A tricky relationship

[csharpmin]

I'm trying to create a portal that shows all possible tags for a contact as well as an "x" indicating the current contact's associated tags.

To make matters slightly trickier, I'm actually trying to create several portals that each show tags of a certain type.

Let's focus on one example. This description is the way the portal SHOULD work. In a portal called "Boards & Committees" the rows include the following tag names:

Board of Directors

Medical Advisory Board

Dinner Committee

Business Council

In John Doe's contact record, All four of these appear, and "Board of Directors" has an "x" next to it. In Jane's record, All four appear, but none has an "x". In George's record, all appear, and Dinner Committee and Business Council have "x"s.

Keep in mind there more tags than these 4, but only these four have "Boards & Committees" in the section name field of the Tag table.

I've got everything working, except the "x"s, though I suspect in getting the "x"s to work, will require getting the other things to work a different way.

I've included a simple database illustrating this problem.

Each contact record has three portals, the one called "Boards & Committees Tags" is not working properly, in that the x's do not accurately reflect the tags belonging to the contact. The two other portals, work properly and show slightly different information.

If someone could help me get the x's to show the correct data (they should be indicating the rows from the second portal), I would greatly appreciate it.

Test_Tag_Database.fp7.zip

[Matthew F]

Maybe its just me, but I can't figure out what sort of behavior you are hoping to achieve. Do you really need to show these "boards and committees tags" in a portal? Why not a regular field formatted as a checkbox set?

[csharpmin]

A portal would be ideal because there will actually be more fields associated with each tag record in the portal than just the tag name, modifiers like location and terms for politicians and press type and location for press, etc. Also the ability to easily create new tags without additional programming or formatting. Also sorting portals is much more robust than sorting value lists.

If what I'm trying to do is impossible, or if the way to do it is klunkier than an alternative, I'll re-examine my approach, as I know there are several other ways I could do this kind of thing. Thanks for your very practical suggestion, but I'm still hoping to find a solution to the problem as I've posed.

[Vaughan]

One way is to make two fields in each portal: one with the attribute name (Board of Directors) and another with the value, which should be 0 or 1.

Make a value list with the sole vale 1. Format the Value field with this value list and then hide the 1. Position the Value field so the attribute field appears to be the label.

Set the Value field with an auto-enter that inserts 0 if the field is empty, and set it to overwrite existing entries.

Case( isempty( value ) ; 0 ; value )

Now the portal rows will display the attribute name and a checkbox that will contain 0 if false and 1 if true.

There is a trickier way of doing it with related value lists but I forget how it's done now. :

[csharpmin]

I don't follow. I'm not sure which table you are suggesting I add the new field in. Also I don't see how your value field relates to a contact's tags. It seems like instructions for making a checkbox instead of an X. I'm looking for the programming behind what would put an x in the portal if a contact has the selected tag. Later, I'll replace the x with a graphic of a filled in checkbox if true, or an unfilled checkbox if false. Furthermore, I'm not looking for how to create a contact's connection to a tag, rather how to display the relationship that exists. I'll take care of adding tags to a contact with a script.

I feel like my problem lies in either the calculation of the tag_checkbox field in the tag_members table or in the relationship on which it is based. Still looking for a solution, unless I've misunderstood and you can clarify.