FileMaker Pro 11: The Missing Manual

Chapter 13. Advanced Relationship Techniques

In the previous chapter, you learned how to use the tools in FileMaker Pro Advanced to make your development tasks—like debugging your database and creating custom menus—easier. That’s a great start on thinking like a developer. Now it’s time to turn your attention back to relationships and delve into some of the more powerful features in the Relationships graph. Your first relationships, like the ones you created on Viewing the new table’s layout, were of the most basic type: they used a single key field pair and the value in those key fields matched exactly. But you can also create relationships that work when values don’t match, by using an operator other than the “=” sign. And just as you can add more criteria to a search, you can also add multiple criteria to a relationship. You do that for the same reason you add more criteria to a search: because you want the results to be more specific, as when you need a customer ID and a date field each to match corresponding fields in a related table. And just as you can sort a portal separately from the underlying relationship’s sort order, the Portal Setup dialog box also lets you filter related records to show only some related records.

You’ll also delve deeper into table occurrences. FileMaker lets you create as many instances of a table as you need on the graph. Once you know about more complex joins, you have the tools you need to start making those multiple table occurrences. But as your ...