Creating Many-to-Many Portal

[natekruser]

Hi, I'm new to Filemaker, and ran into problems with some of my first layouts.

I've read through the forums, and think I'm on the right track for a many-to-many relationship. So far I have three tables:

Person

PersonID

...

Role

RoleID

Title

...

PersonsRoles (an intermediate join table)

PersonID

RoleID

I allow creation of records within the 'PersonsRoles' table through the relationships to the other two tables.

In a layout for Person I've created a Portal. The portal points to 'PersonRoles', and shows 'PersonRoles::RoleID' and 'Roles::Title'. I can create/update rows in the portal using 'PersonRoles::RoleID'. However, this is not very easy to use.

I created a value-list containing the values from 'Roles::Title', and made that field in the portal into a pop-up-menu using that value list. However, it does not update the intermediate table, it changes the 'Role' table.

How can I add Roles in the Person layout from a list of values?

[comment]

Your value list should be defined to use values from Roles::RoleID, also display values from Roles::Title. The value list needs to be attached to the PersonRoles::RoleID field in the portal. If you want to also display the Roles::Title field in the portal, make it non-enterable.

Explore the 'Show values only from second field' option in the value list definition, in conjunction with a drop-down and a pop-up.