Re: Portal relationship

On Apr 28, 6:56 pm, David <davidandh...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi. I have three tables: managers, contacts and phone numbers. Each
manager can have multiple contacts, and each contact can have multiple
phone numbers. On the manager layout, I created a portal to list the
phone numbers for all related contacts. This works fine until I
realized that any contacts *without* phone numbers won't appear in the
portal at all. This is a problem since I use the portal and GTRR to
navigate from manager to related contacts (whether or not they have a
phone number).

As a possible solution, I made a script that creates a 'blank' phone
number everytime a new contact is created. The 'blank' phone number
lists the contact name and dutifully appears in the manager's portal.
The trouble is I can't think of a clever calculation/relationship that
can distinguish when to use the 'blank' phone number (ie, for a
contact without phone numbers) and when to ignore the blank (ie, when
a contact has one or more real phone numbers). This became especially
tricky with multiple contacts, phone numbers, etc...

Any suggestions? I also tried making a "Show All Contacts" button,
but that seems inelegant and doesn't really solve the problem.
Thanks!

FM Advanced 8.5 on Mac OS 10.5.2

You don't really use the portal to GTRR to related contacts. You use
a relationship upon which the portal is also based. Instead of
creating a bunch of fake records, create another relationship
instead. One that includes all contacts, whether they have a phone
number or not, then GTRR on that relationship.
.