Nesting Portals

[jhegyi]

I'm trying to put 3 related portals on a single layout to drill down data to specific records.  In particular I have tables for Insurance Companies, Explanation of Benefits (EOBs), and Details.  Each Insurance company sends us multiple EOBs explaining payments made on the the behalf of one or more patients.  

 

I would like to click on the Insurance portal to select an insurance company.  This will show the EOBs received in the EOBs portal.  The final portal should show the list of patients with claims on the selected EOB.  

 

In my relationship graph I have Insurances primary key linked to the insurance foreign key in the EOBs table.  Then I have the EOB primary key linked to the EOB foreign key in the details table.

 

I have the first two portals displaying data correctly, but the details portal won't show the patients listed on the EOB. When I select an insurance company it shows all of the patient on all of the EOBs, no matter which EOB is selected.  It seems like its not filtering the details by EOB. 

 

Any suggestions? Thanks!

[eos]

I have the first two portals displaying data correctly, but the details portal won't show the patients listed on the EOB. When I select an insurance company it shows all of the patient on all of the EOBs, no matter which EOB is selected.  It seems like its not filtering the details by EOB. 

 

That's right. A chain of relationships filters cumulatively, i.e. for

 

A --< B --< C

 

a portal from an A context into C will show the Cs that are related to all the Bs that are related to your current A (as you've just experienced). Your clicking into / selecting a portal row doesn't have any impact on the definition of the relationship and its filtering effect.

 

You could either filter the existing Patients portal (convenient to program, but slow for many related records and/or slow connections), or add another relationship into Patients (directly from Insurances), then use to script to set a field (for the portal filter/as relationship match field) or a global $$var (as portal filter) with the ID of the clicked EOB (or reset an already set one, giving you an unfiltered view).

 

Added benefit: use the field/$$var to Conditionally Format the selected EOB portal row (key in that field equals key in portal row record). 

[jhegyi]

Thank you so much for your reply.  I'm not sure I followed your suggestion exactly but, I created a global field in the EOBs table to store the EOB ID number.  I added a script step to copy the EOB ID number to the new global field when the EOB is clicked.  I changed the relationship graph so the EOB table links to the Details table via the new global field.  It works perfectly now.