Before retirement, I used for years the old Filemaker 3, that's right, Three, on the job. Now, in retirement, I have upgraded to a Mac G5 and bought Filemaker 7, so portals, tables and complex linkages other than lookups are new to me.

I want to create a database of my jazz collection. Starting with the Music database that came with the program, I have added to the basic album layout:
1) a repeating field for the musicians on the album, which looks up their insruments from a new, separate musicians table, and
2) my first try at a portal, one that draws from a third table for songs that supplies composer, lyricist and historical notes for each tune.

What I would like to be able to do is:

a) to click on a musician in a layout of that table and then trigger a search for all albums he/she is on, i.e., reporting a list of the albums on the original table. Even better if they are clickable to take me to the individual album page.

b) to click on a song from the song table to find all albums the song is on.

Each of the above would use only a direct linkage of two tables. However, would it also be possible to click on a song, for instance, and get a list of all the musicians that have played that song? Even better sorted by alpha and including the album titles? This seems to mean linking the song table to the musicians table, when each is already linked separately to the albums table, and I don't know if you can do that, essentially form a circle of links among three tables.

Finally: I have read elsewhere an asseertion by a developer that repeating fields are now passe. I never bothered to learn how to get arouond the searching limitations they had in the days of old. Is there a better way to deal with song and musician lists on the album page and still have search capabilities? I am now mucking around in some thick books on the program in search of enlightenment with little success so far.
Jim Young

James I cannot be of help as I am trying to work through much the same portal scenario. I have developed a contact database from the FM7 template and am trying to get some info from another separate database. I had it working for a couple of minutes but did something to mess it. I will had that I Purchased Learn FM Pro 7 by Jonathan Stars and could not make much head way using that. I am a novice but have achieved a lot through trial and error and just getting these last seemingly simple portals to work would be great.

So I shall look to see if any answers come for your problem as it will resolve mine also, so here's hoping and a thank you in advance to any assistancew to both of us.

Hi.

You've asked a lot of questions; hopefully some of the following will get you going.

For starters, I'd suggest you download the free version of CC Time, our time tracking application. This file is completely unlocked for you to take apart and the Setup tab of this system does some of the things you want.

It shows a portal of clients; if you then click on any client, the next portal shows a list of the Projects for that client. You can take this example and continue it so that clicking on a project reveals yet another list- of that project's staff, for example. The key here is that a script run when clicking in one portal row sets a global field which is the criteria for the next portal row.

I think that taking CC Time apart will show you how you might accomplish some of the things you're after.

Even better if they are clickable to take me to the individual album page.

You can do this using the technique illustrated above: when you click on an album, you could set a global field that brings in related information for that album. (Kind of a no-row portal if you want to think of it that way).

More common, however, would be to use the GoToRelatedRecord script step when clicking on the album. Search for "Go To Related Record" in FileMaker's built in help and click on the third entry, "Go to Related Record script step" for a good overview of this.

Finally: I have read elsewhere an asseertion by a developer that repeating fields are now passe. I never bothered to learn how to get arouond the searching limitations they had in the days of old. Is there a better way to deal with song and musician lists on the album page and still have search capabilities?

Yes. On the album's record you'd want to show two portals of related records, one for musicians on that album, and one for songs on that album.

In this context, I can recommend the FileMaker Professional Training II Book and CD. This book makes extensive use of an example of students, teachers, and classes. This is analogous to your musicians / ablums / songs situation and the book goes into some detail explaining the different relational structure used to show the difference (for instance) between all the unique students taught by a teacher, and all the students in one of the teacher's classes.

You can essentially "form a circle of links among three tables" and the example in the book is quite like that.

Hope that helps.

John