Nesting Portals

[Danjmains]

Hi,

 

I have a design idea in mind that the only way I can describe it is nesting a portal within a portal.


In my solution I have a case or ticketing system. 

I have a customer record in the customers table, and a case record in the cases table, and then a case notes table which holds multiple notes that can be added to each individual case. As a customer can have multiple cases, and one case can have multiple note records, I currently use the customers layout to go to the cases layout. 

This works fine, but I would like to streamline it so I can view all cases and notes on each case from the main customer page without having to navigate to another layout. I'm wondering if what I have in mind is at all possible

Basically what I want looks like this:

 

Customer: John Doe

Address: 123 Fake Street, Fake City, FS, 12345

Phone: 123-333-4444

Product: Bippity Boop Snoop

 

CASES:

-----------------------------------

CASE #100

==========

Case assigned to: username | Department: customer service | Status: In Progress

----------------------------------Case notes (this would be the nested portal type portal)-------------------------------ADD NOTE + ---------------------------------------

Note #1 user: username | Note # 1 date: date | Note # 1 time: 10:00AM

Note: this is note # 1 for case #100

------------------------------------------------

Note #2 user: username | Note #2 Date: 10/10/2010 | Note #2 time: 10:00AM

Note: this is note #2 for case #100

-

-

Case #101

======================

Case assigned to: new user | Department: Warranty | Status: Closed

----------------------------------Case notes (this would be the nested portal type portal)-------------------------------ADD NOTE + ---------------------------------------

Note #1 user: username | Note # 1 date: date | Note # 1 time: 10:00AM

Note: this is note # 1 for case #101

------------------------------------------------

Note #2 user: username | Note #2 Date: 10/10/2010 | Note #2 time: 10:00AM

Note: this is note #2 for case #101

-

-

 

 

If this is possible, this would be so perfect for keeping the user experience very streamlined and clean without having too many different layouts. 

 

Thanks in advance,

Dan. 

[comment]

Portals cannot be nested.

Some alternatives to consider:

1. Place a portal to Notes on the layout of Customers. Use calculation fields and/or conditional formatting/hiding to show the case details only on the first row of each case.
2. Place a portal to Notes next to the portal to Cases and filter it to show only the Notes of a selected case.

Edited December 15, 2015 by comment

[jasonwood]

You could also use the List function in Cases to create a field that shows all notes.

I assume you are only wanting to read the notes from your Customer layout (no editing), if so, the benefit of showing all notes in one field is that you are not constrained by the fixed height of a portal row. Long and short notes simply flow one after another.

First create a calculation in notes that contains everything you want to display for each note (id, user, date, time, note), then create a calculation in Cases using a List() function to combine all the notes into one.

You could adapt comment's suggestion #2 by placing a portal to cases on one side of the screen, and a single notes field on the right, which would show all of the notes for the selected case.