Portal record resetting

[fbugeja]

Re  a portal I have set up: in some instances when I click a record in a portal, it resets to the first record in the portal while in other instances, the portal will "stick" on the current portal - which is what I want - and not reset to the first record. Am using Filemaker 12. Anyway to stop the reset?

 

Note: in the portal setup, "Show vertical scroll bar" is selected and "Reset scroll bar when exiting record" is not selected.

 

Any help is appreciated!

 

Frank

[johndwalton2012]

Frank,

In the layout properties check to make sure that record changes are not saved automatically. This issue, which can be very confusing, is caused because of the different behavior between committing a record and navigating to another element. When you navigate to another element, the focus in the portal will remain the same. When the record is committed, the focus in the portal will reset to the first row in the portal.

Regards,

John Walton

[Lee Smith]

When you click on a portal row, are you going to the related record? If so, you can open the related file in a New Window, do what changes you need, and when you close the new window, FileMaker will return to same portal row.

[Rick Whitelaw]

Frank,

In the layout properties check to make sure that record changes are not saved automatically. This issue, which can be very confusing, is caused because of the different behavior between committing a record and navigating to another element. When you navigate to another element, the focus in the portal will remain the same. When the record is committed, the focus in the portal will reset to the first row in the portal.

Regards,

John Walton

This seems like bad advice.

[fbugeja]

Lee - the portal does work as expected. When I click on a portal row, it does go to the related record. However, it does it in the same window - which makes it easy to use for the staff I work with. I am learning to live with it. The ease of navigating to specific records without needing to search for them outweighs the issue I raised - not that staff who use the database would notice it!

 

Rick / John - staff who use the database use it to find a record. For consistency in data entry, I am the only one who makes changes to the database. If they do make changes, they are lost when I upload the latest copy of the file to the shared drive in our office. What I am finding is that when I go to another record after I select a record from a portal row, sometimes the portal resets when the new record displays ... and sometimes it doesn't!

[milanm]

All of the above makes some partial sense, but i think the question is how to make the active portal row STAY in the same place on the SAME window after the script "Go to related record..." has been trigerred. So we could use the portal as the side menu where users click and navigate using the portal without jumping back to row 1 and scrolling down all the time, right.

I also commited a fair research on this and could not find a native and good way, you could try something with variables remembering the row than going back to it but this is still jumpy. Will keep on searching and post it here if i find the way somewhere...

[milanm]

I actually found an interesting workarround that i would like to share. It keeps the portal row position in exactly the same place without jumping anywhere and yet shows the related records on the right hand side. I could not upload the example at the moment as this is a part of a bigger system (will do if anybody shows any interest), so i will just try to explain.

I made 3 TOs of the same table, lets say "Clients", Clients1, Clients2 and Clients3. On the layout based on Clients1 i placed a portal based on Clients2. Clients1 and Clients2 are joined by x relationship, so all the clients are shown in the portal. The field "Clients::gClientReference" is created as a global field. Than i joined TO Clients2 with TO Clients3 where Clients2::gClientReference = Clients3::ClientReference (this would be the unique clients reference).

I placed a portal based on Clients2 on the left hand side and client details that the user wants to see on the right hand side, but not the fields from the original table on which layout is based, instead i placed the fields from table Clients3 related by global field.

When the user clicks on the portal row it sets up the global field to be the same as client reference in the active row and automaticaly shows the data related to that reference in Clients3 fields on the right hand side.

I know that this is a lot of acrobacy for such a simple task but only in this way i was able to allow users to comfortably use the portal as a link side bar, they just click where they want to clck and the portal row just stays in place.

Hope this helps somebody finally, untill some better solution comes in place. 

[comment]

This will work if all you want is to display the selected related record's details. See also:

http://fmforums.com/forum/topic/71867-getting-more-out-of-filtered-portals-2view-selected-child/