Subscribe to this thread
Home - General / All posts - Record related Tab
apo
171 post(s)
#31-Mar-21 08:40

Dear all

I use and abuse the functionality of linking a record to other records in an annex table through the Related Tab. I use this functionality mainly to display the "human friendly" description of fields encoded in a census. This implies most of the time a relationship of type N:1 and therefore displays only one record at a time in the tab.

My problem concerns the non-persistence of this link. I would have loved it if it had been linked to the column rather than the window to keep it between sessions. Am I the only one?

adamw


10,447 post(s)
#31-Mar-21 13:36

Do you mean something like storing integer codes in a field and then using the Related tab to look up the name associated with the code in the picked record? Aka lookup fields in 8? Because if so, we are planning to add lookup fields to 9.

apo
171 post(s)
#31-Mar-21 13:46

Not really I was just looking for a mean to make the link permanent. It is true that the lookup fields M8-style will also do the trick but is a really less dynamic solution as we have to set or update the values in all the tables. The solution provided by related tab is really smart has it allows us not to show only one value/columns but several.

I have a recent example. we do have for the enterprise activity codes. Based on the activity codes we can display on the side the name of the activity as upper groups or classes. For this reason the related tab is in my daily business more powerful and versatile than the lookup approach. But I have to reset it in every session. I should surely miss any difficulty in doing that but in my naive understanding it virtually link two tables using to columns and I see that as a property of a given column in a given table.

adamw


10,447 post(s)
#31-Mar-21 13:51

Understood. We might try saving this into component properties. We don't do this currently because we want the Related tab to work for read-only databases and are reluctant to save in some cases but not in others (that's too much magic, ends up looking unpredictable). But maybe we could add separate buttons to save / restore + perhaps allow saving multiple different variants.

apo
171 post(s)
#31-Mar-21 15:07

I would love it on a daily basis

Manifold User Community Use Agreement Copyright (C) 2007-2021 Manifold Software Limited. All rights reserved.