Trying to avoid reinventing the wheel.

I'm going to do a filtered portal with 5 popups for choices. (Choice1 Choice2 Choice3 Choice4 Choice5)

"All" "All" "All" "All" "All" would show every portal record. "All" "All" Choice3 "All" "All" would show some records and a selection other than "All" in every popup would be the most discriminating.

It's a mathematical solution and I'm hoping someone has the formula or an Excel file that will let me calculate all the possibilites and create a text file for pasting into the calc field easily rather than plundering through it . I think the number of possibilities is 5^4 but maybe I've forgotton too much high school algebra.

P.S. I'm going to use the GetField function to make the filtering user definable so I'll share that with this group when done.

[ February 11, 2002, 05:13 PM: Message edited by: signal ]

Whoa! I think you're working much too hard. All you really need is a relationship between two text fields. Each text field would be a multi-key NOT a compound key. The left key field is a global to select the contents of the portal. The left field for "all" would be:

Choice1 <cr>

Choice2 <cr>

Choice3 <cr>

Choice4 <cr>

Choice5 <cr>

Likewise, the right key field could contain one or more of Choice1 ... Choice 5 separated by carriage returns. A checkbox field with the choices from 1 to 5 could be used as the left side (of the relationship) global field (and for the related field for that matter).

-bd

I must have dain bramage. I did this before for another project and based it Rich Coloumbre's book.

For simplicity, lets say I am showing only three fields in the portal :

"LastName" "FavoriteColor" "GraduationYear"

My three globals would contain value lists that show the values from a field and using a substitute function, the word "All".

So the child database would contain a text calc that looked like this:

"All" & "All" & "All"