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I'm having trouble with my layout theory and am hoping someone can present a solution. I have 3 layers of tables that I'm trying to fit onto one page (they're tables with very few fields). One table layer represents stores, the next layer represents receipts received from that store, and the final layer represents items on that receipt. Each relation is a parent child of the next. So the way I have it laid out at the moment is the main page has the store information, within this page is a portal for receipts. I found out that portals can't be nested so I tried putting another portal on the main page for the item list on the receipts, which kind of work in that it does allow for items to be listed, however, it only lists items on the first receipt. I can't figure out a way for the portal to display and create by default items from the second or third receipt.

Just to note, this is a data entry layout, so all portals are set to allow for adding from this page. If it was just display, I know I could just make the item portal show all items and filter by receipt foreign key, but what I want is for the creation from this page to default create to whatever receipt I want...

Can anyone explain a way for me to do this? I'm pretty new to filemaker and have been working off of tutorials for the most part so any clear and idiot proof explanation would be appreciated.

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You might consider having a "Working Receipt" field on your Store table. Then you can link Stores::Store -< Receipts::Store and Stores::Working Receipt -< Line Items::Receipt. Set the UI so that when the user clicks on a Receipt in the Receipts portal the row highlights and sets the Working Receipt number. This will cause the Line Items for that receipt to show. –  pft221 Dec 31 '12 at 5:15

1 Answer 1

If you have a script trigger on the receipts portal that fetches the receipt id, you can put that in a global field in a system table. You can the set a default value for the receipt foreign key in the line item table to that global field. It should then automatically fetch that id when you create a new post as long as you have the correct id in the global field.

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