Horizontal Portals

Working with user interfaces and creating new records together form a large part of working with portals. Another issue developers often face is the desire to have a portal scroll from left to right rather than vertically.

Horizontal portals are one of the grails which FileMaker developers seek. Although FileMaker 8 doesn't offer the capability to scroll through columns, rather than rows, of related records (or simply scroll horizontally to view more data in a related record row), you can easily display a fixed number of related records side by side without any fuss. Use the format options in the Portal Setup dialog to display related records to control different starting rows for multiple, side-by-side portals. An example is shown in Figure 16.6.

Figure 16.6. Notice that the rightmost portal has a scrollbar. That ensures that however many related records this record has, they will all be accessible to your users.