hi, i know using portal's filtering is a major pain. i tried making occurance and filtering a unstored field. is that possible?

What is the best way in doing a filtering of data to be displayed in a portal? i have seen ppl saying using relationship is the best bet.

When you filter the relationship the portal will only pull the records that meet the filter criteria. When you use a portal filter, the portal pulls over all related records before applying the filter. So if there are thousands of related records and you use a filter to narrow it down to 2 you are still pulling thousands through the relationship to get to those 2. So for overhead a portal filter doesn't do you any favors. I have also found little use for portal filters because it actually becomes very difficult to do something as easy as showing a count of the records in the portal. With a filtered relationship you can have a calc field with Get (foundcount) in the portal table and place it on the parent layout to show a count of the records in the portal. With a filtered portal you will get a count of the records through the relationship without the filter.

I tried using filtered portals when they came out for a veriety of things but it seems like I have since switched them all back over to a filtered relationship for one reason or another..

What is the best way in doing a filtering of data to be displayed in a portal?

Limit the number of matched records as much as possible in the Relationship, so the portal filter calculation runs on as few records as possible.

And if you do need to work with a list of hundreds of records, consider using a list view instead of a portal.