I've got a file with the following:

- an Estimates table where I record information about projects
- a Companies table that keeps track of companies involved in the
projects
- a Bids table that's viewed on the Estimates layout in a portal.

Each company in the Companies table is categorized as a certain Type
-- for the sake of this example, let's say they do either Masonry,
Roofing or Carpentry. The Bids portal only displays two of the Bids
table's fields: Type and Company.

Now the number of companies is not all that great -- it's a small
town; there'll never be very many -- so when I want to add a company
to an estimate, I'd like to do it without clicking buttons and popping
up dialogs and all the usual pick-list activity that we go through to
make it easy for users to relate data from one table to a record in
another. If I assign a value list to the Type field -- Masonry,
Roofing, Carpentry -- then simply by choosing one of those types, I
could limit the number of companies in the Company drop-down value
list by (on average) two-thirds the number of records in the Companies
table, therefore making it easier to pick a company after I've picked
a type.

Or I _could_ do this if I were able to constrain the value list in the
second field (Company) based on the value in the first (Type). This
is easily done for fields on the layout that are actually in that
layout's table, but these fields are in a portal -- a different table
-- so that values in a Company value list can't be limited to only
those companies that match the Type in the first field. Can they?

I could do it with a couple of globals above the portal and have a
button that then creates the record in Bids, but must I? Is there any
way I could just pull down the Type field in the portal, click
Roofing, and then have all the roofing companies listed in the value
list in the second field? No buttons, no pop-up dialogs, no weird
layout tricks? Just simple data entry, clean and uncomplicated?

That's what I'd like to know. I'm on Mac OS X, FM Advanced 10.0v3.

Thanks as always for any input.
-Jahn