More details on each of these steps follow.įirst, you need to specify where the portal gets its data. Choose data fields for display in the portal.Choose a table occurrence from which to display data.In general, when you set up a portal for the first time, you'll need to do the following: The dialog is shown in Figure 6.10.įigure 6.10. You'll get a dialog box asking for details about the portal's contents, behavior, and display. You should be able to tell the table context by the fields on the layout, but you'll recall that the Layout Setup dialog, accessible from the Layouts menu while in Layout mode, gives the definitive answer.Ĭlick once on the tool, and then, on the layout, drag out a box wide enough to show an entire town officer's name and release the mouse. This is a layout in Layout mode, showing the FileMaker portal tool. After you're on this layout, drop into Layout mode and you'll see the portal tool among the available tools in the status bar (see Figure 6.9).įigure 6.9. To see a portal in action, navigate to a layout that has the parent table (Town, in this case) as its table context. In the case of the Towns database, a portal lets you look at records in the TownOfficer table while you're sitting on the "parent" Town record.įor addition discussion of the "parent/child" naming convention, see "One-to-Many Relationships," p. A portal is a special FileMaker layout element that lets you work with data across two (or sometimes more) tables at once. Additionally, there's no way to see a list of town officials when looking at the master town record in the Town table.įileMaker solves both these problems with a tool called a portal. That seems like a tedious way to create data, and it's potentially error-prone because a user must know and correctly enter the TownID of every town. One way would be to navigate to the TownOfficer layout and create a record for each official, assigning a TownID of 1 to each. But how do we use them? Say there's a record for a town called Gorre, with a TownID of 1, and you want to enter information about the mayor and town councilors of Gorre. The town records database system has two tables in it now. Using a Portal to View Related Child Data This section shows you how to begin to use your relationships to work with and create data in multiple tables at once. So far in this chapter you've learned how to create additional tables in a FileMaker system and how to build relationships between those tables based on well-constructed match fields.
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