portals without relationships?

[christof]

Is is possible to have a portal display the records of another database without using a relationship? I have an office-wide contacts database that would be used to help populate project specific contact databases. Something like a layout for the office-wide list, and a layout for the project list, but with no real relationship between the two. Since we have consultants that we use on multiple projects, their records should appear in both places, as well as have some different info for that consultant for each project. Hope I'm making sense.

[tlsparker]

You can base a relationship on a constant value if you want to display all the data. Create a calculated field = "1" in both files and base the relationship on this field. If you want to vary which records show in the portal, you can use a script to find those records, then use the replace command to set the key field value to "1" in your found set (in this case it would be a text field rather than a calculation field).

Is this what you had in mind?

Tom

[Steven H. Blackwell]

You would of course want to be very careful using the replace command in a multiuser environment, especially if the result sets are critical. Records can be skipped if locked.

A multi-key might be a better approach. In the "child" file construct a text field and separate the keys by a paragraph return. You could enter multiple foreign keys here. In the main file, then any record having a primary key that matches any line of the multi-key will show that foreign record in its portal.

There are some limits on the length of multikeys and on the number of lines such a key can handle, but this will work in many instances.

HTH

Old Advance Man