[FX.php List] Portal vs 2nd query [Was: Related Records]

[Joel Shapiro]

Let me see if I understand:

A business has two contacts, Joel and Derrick.  Joel has two phone  
numbers and Derrick has one.

On a layout based on the Business table, I have a portal to the  
ContactPhone records.  When the portal is sorted by ContactID, the  
rows would look like:
C12    555-1234    Joel
C12    555-1235    Joel
C14    444-2222    Derrick

You're saying that I could pull in these 3 related records via code  
like your earlier sample:
> $prow = 0;
> while($value['Relationshipname::ID_Field'][$prow]) {
> 	echo $value['Relationshipname::Data_Field'][$prow];
> 	echo "<br />";
> 	$prow++;
> }
and then within the PHP break these 3 into their 2 respective  
contacts -- kind of like a subsummary in FMP.

Is that right?

And this would be as opposed to pulling in the two contact records  
separately from a portal of Contacts.  Or would you do both?

If you have any code already written that does something like this,  
I'd love to see it.

Thanks very much,
-Joel



On Mar 21, 2006, at 11:14 AM, Derrick Fogle wrote:

> In FM7/8, the relationship structure allows you to have a portal to  
> a related table, and also show data from relationships that are  
> farther down the line, or closer to the source table. One of my  
> applications is a typical Many-Many relationship: each Job can have  
> multiple Clients, and each Client can have multiple Jobs. So  
> there's a join table in between that also has information about  
> client roles and such.
>
> In FM, my layout is showing records from the Job. on that layout, I  
> have a portal that shows all the related client link records from  
> the linking table. But I'm only showing a couple fields from that  
> particular table. The client linking table is, of course, also  
> related to the client table, and most of what is seen in that  
> portal is data coming from the client info table.
>
> It's not a portal in a portal, but it's actually pretty trivial to  
> create that appearance in FX.php. In your instance, you need to  
> create a portal on a layout whose native table is Business, that  
> shows the ContactPhone table data. In that portal, you can also  
> show the Contact data because it's in the relationship chain. So  
> you have few extra Contact fields in the portal that shows  
> ContactPhone, and that Contact data might be the same for all the  
> portal records. Make sure the portal is sorted so that the contact  
> information comes through in order.
>
> Once you've got this data in FX.php, use PHP variables to suppress  
> the duplicated information in your loop. If you need some help with  
> that code, let me know.
>
> Thanks,
>
> On Mar 21, 2006, at 12:37 PM, Joel Shapiro wrote:
>
>> So are you able to display a portal within a portal?  Or are you  
>> using a GetNthRecord calc field in the Child records to show the  
>> Grandchildren records within the Child portal?  Or are you doing  
>> something else magic??
>
>
> Derrick Fogle
> derrick at fogles.net
>
>
>
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