The Power of Portals

[Jack Rodgers]

This is an excerpt with improvs from a post in another thread...

 

In a 100 table solution:

 

Let's create a new file called find. Or this could be just a table in a large file.

 

Create a table named Menu.

 

Menu Fields will be globals and reference the items you wish to find in the other tables. Let me use serial number. You will see how easy this will be for any other item of information

 

Now I create a Serial Number TO for Repairs, Rentals, Inventory and other tables that use a serial number. These tables can be in the one file or in other files.

 

I link each table to the serial number global by serial number field.

 

Now I create a form layout Named Find Serial Number with the global field serial number at the top.

 

I add a portal for each file using the serial number TO. I might name each TO Serial Number Rentals, Serial Number Repairs, etc.

 

To each portal I add the appropriate fields from the related file. I may have 15 different portals on the layout making TABS very useful.

 

Now when I enter a serial number in the global field, all of the portals display the records with that serial number.

 

I might see 5 rental records, 6 repairs, 1 sold, 1 inventory record, 125 credit card charges, 300 manual payments, 14 Late Notices, 23 Reminders, and so on. This method puts the entire data history for the serial number at my finger tips.

 

This should answer the statement about portals not being very useful. If you haven't done this before and try it as a test, it will change your life... smiley_cool

[Maarten Witberg]

yeah.

not to mention the use of portals for

- cascading info (portal 1 shows details from parent, portal 2 shows details from the selected row in portal 1)

- dynamic typeahead filtering, dynamic range filtering

- calendars

- creating hierarchies.

 

and who knows what else might come up.

[oleung]

Hi Kjoe,

 

Can you show me some example for cascading info, as I don't know how to achieve this.

 

- cascading info (portal 1 shows details from parent, portal 2 shows details from the selected row in portal 1)

 

 

Thanks,

[mfif]

Edit: sorry, gave a good answer to a different question. smiley-frown

[Maarten Witberg]

not sure if you still want it, but here's a pretty good example