ISO FileMaker Magazine: FileMaker Video Tutorials, Templates, Help & More

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Alright so I like Harry Potter :)

Before we start, so that no one spends time reading something that won't be useful to them, the final purpose of this post is to achieve a report like this.

So, to the Order of the Portal Printing Taboo...ers: It seems that printing portals is about as Taboo as using repeating fields these days (talk to Soren if you want proof of the repeating fields part of that statment ;) – you’ll find him floating around on FM Forums).

I'll agree that in most cases printing portals isn’t appropriate (just like repeating fields) – the most common misuse for example is by new users who, blissfully unaware of the standard FileMaker reporting method (we'll refer to as "list view" reporting), use them purely because it’s the only way they have seen of listing related data.

On the other hand, what about those users who know what they’re doing? What about those users who long for FileMaker to integrate the sub-reporting functionality available in other Reporting / Database tools such as MS Access. Look inside your hearts lol – shouldn’t they at least be given a glimmer of hope?

When to use the technique

A common use might be a summary report about a person within your database: phone numbers, addresses, family member names, contact reminders, general notes, contact made or a million other things. Our example (downloadable at the bottom as well as an example report) uses a Company example.

How It works

Well, here’s the aim of the technique: Display related information about a record whilst hiding a) the portal and b) the column / section headers when they aren’t required due to a lack of related information.
Before I go into the details, Sliding: If you select an object in Layout Mode in FileMaker, go to Format -> Set Sliding / Printing. For the purposes of this exercise, select: Sliding up Based on All Above, Also reduce size of enclosing part.

a) Hiding The Portal
The method for this has been provided to us by FileMaker – It’s called Sliding (kind of like the 1990’s TV series Sliders but not really). The idea behind sliding is kind of like the idea behind shrink wrap: You make your container as high as you reasonably think it will ever have to be (you have a limit of 12 pages) and sliding will vertically compress the container holding the information to the size that allows the information to just fit within. Please note that I use the term container loosely to refer to all items that contain information including Merge Fields, Fields and Portals. If sliding is set on a portal where no related information exists, it will *pop* into non-existence as if it was never there.

b)Hiding The headers (the cool part)
Okay, so that’s great but you all knew that right? Now I’m sure this thought has occurred to some of you but let’s read that last part again “If sliding is set on a portal where no related information exists, it will *pop* into non-existence” – It stops existing, nada, zilch, gone, disappeared and any other dodgy synonyms you can think of.

So okay, I’ll ask you to consider this, what would happen if we displayed only the first row of a portal and shoved some information in there like … oh maybe column / section headers. What would happen to that portal row if no related information existed in the numbers table – It would like our other portals, simply pop out of existence. So there’s your solution: Put your column headers into a one row portal (from the same TO as the main portal below it)… Set sliding to on for both the header portal row and the main portal and voila – No related records, no portal rows!!

Samples:

The Report
The FileMaker File