Using a Portal to connect inventory to projects

[SCbill]

Hi All,

I'm new to these forums so hopefully I'm posting this is the right spot. I'm fairly new to the more complex elements of Filemaker and have just started getting into Portals. I have two databases, one for Projects (quoting, invoicing) and one for inventory. Through portal filtering I've been able to pull up inventory based off of the type of material chosen in the PROJECT that matches the material in INVENTORY. Specifically, if I'm quoting Material "A", the portal only shows the available material "A" from inventory.

Is there a way for me to go one step further and 'tag' the available inventory for a specific project? For instance...

1. Project 'Smith' requires two pieces of material "A"

2.The portal of INVENTORY shows three available, "A-1, A-2, A-3" along with the value of each

3. I want to tag specifically A-1 and A-2 and have the sum value of those become a value in my project database for this specific record only. Each project is a record.

I assume that I could filter matching the PROJECTS::Project Name = INVENTORY::Project Name, but that would require going into inventory and tagging the material. I could also do this by typing in the name of the project in the inventory portal in the PROJECTS, but I was hoping to create an easier method like maybe a check box or something. Something I could click and it would put the name in and then give me the value of the material.

Any advice would be appreciated. In the mean time, I'm going to use two portals, one that allows me to type the project name into INVENTORY from the PROJECT database and the second that specifically shows what inventory I've assigned to the project.

Thanks

[comment]

Can you elaborate a bit on your real-life scenario?

2.The portal of INVENTORY shows three available, "A-1, A-2, A-3" along with the value of each

A value of what exactly?

3. I want to tag specifically A-1 and A-2

Will this tag be exclusive? IOW, once you have tagged them for project "Smith", they become unavailable to other projects?

[SCbill]

The dollar value of that slab. A-1, A-2, etc, those are slabs of stone. I need to bring the dollar value of the specific slab along so that I can get a sum of material cost for each project. And yes the tag is exclusive and each specific slab will only happen once. I should never again have an A-1 for example in inventory, but we do obviously get some repeated customer names like Smith and Jones.

[comment]

IMHO, you should tag the inventory items with the project's unique ID (not name). This is easy to do by scripting and has the advantage of being stored directly in the material record, thus usable to exclude the tagged records from being shown in the selection portal - see the attached example.

AddRemoveChild.zip

[SCbill]

I don't see anything in that file. Your suggestion sounds like it would allow me to do what I'm asking, but I can't open the zip file.

[Lee Smith]

Hi Bill, and welcome to the forums

Find the file that you downloaded in your desktop and double-click on it. and that should open the file for you.

HTH

Lee

[SCbill]

Sorry, it was just that I was trying to just let Windows open it. Rookie mistake. Winzip did the trick. That file is exactly what I was looking for. Now all I need to do is understand it. Thanks for the help everyone.

[SCbill]

You all probably couldn't care less, but with your help I was able to successfully do this early today. I had to start from scratch to get rid of fields with repetition, but I am up and running. Thanks so much for the help.