VISUAL QUICKPRO GUIDE FileMaker Pro 7 Advanced FOR WINDOWS AND MACINTOSH [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Creating Portals

Portals are tools for accessing multiple records in another table without having to actually copy the data. They are a supercharged alternative to creating a relationship and placing a source table field in a receiver table's layout.

Using a portal, you can display fields from all of another table's related records without duplicating information or bloating a database with information that lives in another place. Take our two example tables, Customer and Sales. You could create a portal in the Customer table to list all of the purchases made by each customer. Once you have a portal, you can use it to create new records in a related field. (See "Creating Related Data with Portals" later in this chapter for more details.)

To create a portal

1 .

Go to the current table layout where the portal will be added and switch to Layout mode (Control+L/Command+L).

Make sure the layout has enough room for the portal (Figure 6.26). If it doesn't, drag the Body tab down to resize the part.

2 .Click the Portal tool. Click on the layout and drag the pointer out and down to size.

3 .

In the Portal Setup dialog box that appears, click the drop-down list and choose the table occurrence for this portal (Figure 6.27).

4 .If you haven't yet created a relationship, choose Define > Database (Control+Shift+D/Command+Shift+D) from the drop-down list and follow the instructions in "To create a match field in a current table" on page 117, then return to the Portal Setup dialog box.

5 .In the Format section of the Portal Setup dialog box, type in the number of rows you want to display.

6 .Click the "Show vertical scroll bar" check box (Figure 6.28). This allows the user to access all the records if there are more records than rows. Click OK.

7 .

When the Add Fields to Portal dialog box appears, select the fields you want to display in the portal from the left scrolling window (Figure 6.29).

The portal will display the fields you select for as many related records as there are in the source table. If there are more records in the related table than rows in the portal, you can use the vertical scroll bar to move down.

8 .

Click OK. Switch back to Browse mode to see the records in the portal (Figure 6.30).

113 in "To create a serial number match field") before you create the portal in your layout.