A Portal to show the same table's records?

[Rich S]

I know I've seen this before but *blush* I've forgotten how it's accomplished. I've searched the threads and couldn't find any posts about it.

What I'd like to do is have a portal as a User Interface sans a standard Parent/Child relationship; when you create records in the portal they would stay in the same table. I think it's done with making a copy of the parent table in the Relationship graph (e.g., Contacts and Contacts2) connected by a Cartesian (sp?) connection, but I just can't remember.

TIA for your help!

[icanhazdatabase]

If your main layout source is A, then add another instance of it to the graph called A_Self and join it to A via a Cartesian join ( _id X _id for example ). If your portal sources A_Self then you will get all the records from that table to show up in the portal.

There are several downsides to doing this, as opposed to a standard list view with headers/footers. Namely, doing sorts and finds in the portal will be very difficult to set up.

[Vaughan]

This technique can also cause record locking issues in multi-user environments.

[Rich S]

Good reasons to ashcan the idea. Thanks for the valuable input, guys!