My previous question involving unique ID field was regards to linking
parts of text in any record to another actual record.

For example, let say I have under a box called Report References in my
database with an example of these 2 report titles:

- Management Styles [button to click to jump to record]
- Financial Statements [button to click to jump to record]

It would be nice to click on each link to go to the actual record that
gives the details of those reports.

I found instructions linking via unique record identifier but I now
believe it may mean linking record to record _only_ where I need
various bits of text in one record to be able to _jump_ to an actual
separate record. It would mean a massive reduction in the data that
would need to be repeated over and over in each record if I could link
them this way.

Here is the situation a bit more "graphically":
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Unique Record ID: 2466

REPORT REFERENCES:
- Management Styles [click here beside to jump to record 1231 for the
Management Styles report information record]
- Financial Statements [click link beside to jump to record 321 for
the Financial Statements report information record]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Is there any way to do this?

Thanks. D

"Cerulean" <Spamming (AT) NOTallowed (DOT) com> wrote

If the Report References is a single Text Field containing all that data,
then the answer is almost certainly no (something would have had to
drastically change between FileMaker 5.5 and 6) - you can't set individual
words / phrases inside a Text Field's data to be clickable.

To achieve this you would need a new Table to store the references, with
each reference stored as a separate record. They would then be displayed on
the parent Record's layout using a Portal. Each reference / Portal line
could then be clickable (or have a pretty button to click) which runs a
script to retrieve the appropriate referred Record's and then display that.

Once the new Table is set up, you would have to manually go through setting
the appropriate ID data ... unless there's some other way to uniquely
identify the appropriate reference Record.


Helpful Harry )

On Thu, 16 Dec 2010 09:11:05 +1300, "Your Name" <your.name (AT) isp (DOT) com>
wrote:

Yes. It is. That's what I thought.

Thanks. I'm not going to re-do the whole thing. Will just have to
live with it or hope that something occurs to me.

Thanks! It was worth a shot.

On Wed, 15 Dec 2010 20:33:10 -0500, Cerulean <Spamming (AT) NOTallowed (DOT) com>
wrote:

[snip]

[snip]

[snip]

I decided on a workaround. I'll leave the information as is in the
large text field box. I'll put a button to the side of that field
that will to some sort of external information source. I'll place all
the extra information in a text file or better yet, into a new layout,
where it'll be more detailed. It's not going to be anywhere near as
good as what I'd hoped but although my structure is pretty fleshed out
in the db, the actual data is in its infancy stages of inputting.
Fortunately, it's all just text and the report records themselves are
small. I can synthesise all the information into one source each one
being a separate record, I think. Inelegant but it's not like there's
going to be gazillions of report records (fortunately). Thanks. If
only I weren't such a beginner developer and unlikely to get more
advanced after all these years. At least this db is light-years
better than the system I was using bedfore, so I can't complain.
It'll work out fine, I think.

Thanks. D

On 16/12/10 1:07 AM, Cerulean wrote:


If the relative location of the referenced text is the same in each
'report', then instead of the report text itself being one field, break
it down into components, i.e. like a template structure.

so:
editable_text_1
referenced_text_1_id
editable_text_2
referenced_text_2_id

Like compiling a standard letter. Don't forget though, that the file
size of text data, if that is your real concern about 'repeated over and
over in each record' , is probably irrelevant. Test it if that is
perceived as an issue.