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CHAPTER 09: Tricks and Techniques
This article is a piece of a larger collection of articles on a proof of concept file I'm doing with the 360Works email plug-in. I'll include some links below for the other articles. As I was building this part of the example file, I knew I'd be doing some portal work that some folks might not have seen before. So I thought I'd document it here in the FileMaker Portals Explored Blog. Here are the previous links ...External Functions Registering Your Plug-in
A Friday Afternoon With The 360Works Email Plug-In
In my proof of concept file, I'm going to have a tab panels called "Emails By Account" and then have a sub-tab panel within it for the accounting, sales, support, management and information tech related emails. Within each of these tab panels will be a portal showing just those emails that account that have a status of unread.
So first we are going to create relationships that match with our possible account options listed above. So we will create some calculate global fields for the parent matching key fields for our dashboard. Then we will set up the relationships for each account, using the Anchor / Buoy design method.
Here you can see the primary match fields that I'll be using in the relationships.
Here you can see the anchor/buoy relationship graph design to allow me to setup a portal per account that is viewed via a tab panel. Next we take our portal that we defined for the Emails (all) tab, copy it, paste it off to the side and shrink it just a little bit to fit into our Emails (by account) sub-tab. We also do not need the To Account field in the nested portal because those portals only show the emails for that account.
Here you can see the Emails All tab. 
Here you can see the Emails By Account Tab, the nested tab panel within it, the chosen Accounting tab selected and the portal within it. 
I decided that I would put a tooltip in place so you can see the to address on the email, just to be sure it is too the correct account. 
Here you can see the portal is showing you that an email was sent to multiple addresses but was included in the tab for this account. =
More info about the author and FileMaker in general, contact me at info@dwaynewright.com.
© 2008 - Dwayne Wright - dwaynewright.com
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