People who know people in a portal

[BevvyB]

Hi folks, first post here. Getting back into FM after a 15 year hiatus! My brain hurts.

Anyway, here's something I'm trying to do and I'm sure it's easy, but I've tied my brain up in knots trying to figure it out so now is the time to ask for help.

 

I have a table of people. I need to know who, from the same table, each one of them knows via a portal, so that a user can pick and choose who each person knows via a dropdown.

For instance, I create a people record called Alan. I know that Alan knows Brian and Colin, so via a portal on Alan's record I select Brian and Colin as people that Alan knows via dropdowns.

In turn, when I then visit Brian and Colin's records, I can see that they both know Alan via the same portal, and deleting these connections removes this bi-directional link.

 

I'm sure the way forward is to create a link table which creates and deletes these connections via the portal on the fly, but although I've managed to get this to work one way only, I've not managed to make it bi-directional i.e. You can set that Alan knows Brian and Colin in his portal, but this isn't reciprocated in Brian and Colin's portals. The only way I can imagine this working (without your help) is that I write a script that creates two records in the link table with flipped IDs. If you've ever tried to do something like this before I hope you know what I'm on about.

 

Thanks in advance for your wisdom! I seem to remember doing something like this 15 years ago, but I think it was a bit of a fudge / inelegant solution and I'm keen to do this by the book!

Julian

 

[comment]

I'm sure it's easy

​I am quite sure it is not. See this thread:

Edited June 16, 2015 by comment

[BevvyB]

So I go away for 15 years, and the first thing I try to do has perplexed even the great and the good. Typical!

Thanks for the info. In at the deep end!

I'm going to come back to this thread after I've had a go at my own method. I'll report back.