Troubleshooting

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Copying and Pasting Fields Between Files

When I copy and paste fields from a layout in one file into another file, sometimes the fields retain their proper identity, sometimes they have no identity, and sometimes they have the wrong identity. Why is that?

When you copy fields from a layout in one file and paste them into another file, they may or may not retain their identity, as you've discovered . A field retains its identity when there exists a field in the destination file that has the same name as the source field. Additionally, the layouts must be based on identically named table occurrences. (It's not enough for the base tables to be named the same.) If the table occurrences match, but no similarly named field is found in that table, then the field displays <field missing> when it's pasted into the destination file. If the table occurrence names don't match, then the field shows up without any identity in the destination file.

Fields in portals behave a bit differently. For them, it's not the field names that must match, but rather the field creation order. If a field displayed in a portal displays the eighth field created in some file, then the portal identifies the pasted field as the eighth field created in the related table in the destination file. This explains why sometimes fields have a new identity. For fields in portals to retain their proper identity, both the table occurrence of the layout and the table occurrence of the related field must be the same in both files, and the fields must have an identical creation order.

Determining Which Records Will Be Displayed on a Layout

I created a table occuurrence that's supposed to display only invoices that are more than 60 days overdue. However, when I build a layout based on this table occurrence, I still see all the invoice records. What did I do wrong?

The problem here isn't anything you've done or haven't done, but rather your expectations. The table occurrence to which a layout is tied never determines what records from the base table are displayed on that layout. It merely determines the starting point on the Relationships Graph from which any action or object involving a relationship is evaluated.

If you have a layout that's tied to an occurrence ” any occurrence ”of an Invoice base table, then all the records from the Invoice table can be viewed from the context of that table occurrence. Think of it this way: A layout's table occurrence doesn't determine what records you can view from that layout, but rather, it determines what records the records of that table can view. So in the case of your table occurrence, which is supposed to show only invoices that are more than 60 days overdue, you'd need to view those via a portal from a layout tied, say, to a Customer table.

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QUE CORPORATION - Using Filemaker pro X
QUE CORPORATION - Using Filemaker pro X
ISBN: N/A
EAN: N/A
Year: 2003
Pages: 494

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