FileMaker Pro 9: The Missing Manual

Managing Data with Data Tunneling

In the first part of this chapter, you learned how to manage data that’s in a table only one relationship away from your source table. For example, earlier in this chapter, you learned how to create line items through a portal in an invoice record. (Remember from the graph in Figure 8-13 that the Invoice table occurrence is directly connected to the Line Items table occurrence.)

But you can also manage data that’s stored farther away on the relationships graph. For example, your Invoice table occurrence is also related to the Expenses table occurrence all the way on the other end of the graph because there’s a continuous line of table occurrences connecting them through their respective relationships (Figure 8-16). Even though they aren’t directly connected, you can still work with data that’s several TOs away from your current table.

WORKAROUND WORKSHOP: When Dragging Doesn’t Do It

When you first learned to create relationships, it was by dragging fields on the relationships graph (Defining the Relationships). Since there’s a clear path from the Expenses table to the Line Items table, you may be tempted to drag the Line Item ID field to connect them. You may have already tried it—and gotten the nasty message shown in Figure 8-15.

FileMaker’s not trying to be difficult. It’s just letting you know that what you’re trying to do doesn’t work, and it’s even going out of its way to suggest a solution. FileMaker’s offering to create a new Line Items table ...