Portal question

[Jenna]

Hi everyone,

I work for a magazine and have to calculate how much to pay each contributing author based on the length of his/her poem or article (this part I have working: I have a "Lines/Words" field where the user enters the number of lines [for poems, b/c we pay per line] or words [for articles, b/c we pay those authors by the word], and a script trigger on the field performs a script to see what "genre" is selected from the drop-down menu (basically, article or poem), then computes the payment for each piece and puts this number in an editable field called "piece payment." I need that field to be editable (and not a calculation field) because sometimes we make special arrangements and pay authors something different from what the length of their piece would indicate.)

Okay, so the hard part is that some authors have more than one piece in each issue, and I want to have a "payment history" portal that lists all pieces a particular author has ever written for us, along with how much we paid for each piece. But the "piece payment" field in the portal only works correctly when there is only one piece per author per issue. When there is more than one piece, the *same payment* (the payment for whatever piece is at the top of the portal list) shows up for *all* the pieces. This only happens in the portal. Also, when I click out of the portal and scroll through the records (some 1000), the payment field disappears from the portal. It only comes back when I go to one of the records that appears in that portal.

Does anyone have any idea what is going on here? Why is FMP only computing the payments when the particular record is active? Can't it store the payment/tie it to the record so that it appears in the "payment history" portal?

Thank you!

Edited July 29, 2010 by Guest

[Jenna]

Never mind! I'm sorry. I just realized my mistake!!