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Using portals in FileMaker Pro is a great way to view a lot of related information on a single screen. For example, if you’re sitting on a contact record, you can have portals that let you view activities, invoices orders, etc. for that contact, all at a glance. If you have a lot of records in your database, you might have to do a lot of scrolling to find, say, an invoice from a few years back. FileMaker 11 has introduced a new feature called “Portal Filtering” that makes this much easier. While it was possible to do this in the past, it involved creating an entirely new relationship for each portal you wanted to filter; so if you wanted to set up multiple portals pointing to invoices from contacts, but wanted to filter them in different ways, you’d have to add a relationship for each portal.
Portal filtering in FileMaker 11 is set up on the portal itself. Using the example above, instead of having multiple relationships to the invoice table (ie. one for each portal), you would have one relationship to invoices and use that for every portal. If you right click on a portal and choose Portal Setup (or just double click on the portal), it brings up the Portal Setup dialogue. Within that is a check box called ‘Filter portal records.’
If you click this checkbox (or the Specify button beside it), this brings you to a standard FileMaker dialogue box. This gives you many options for filtering the portal, since you can use any of the functions, fields and more, that you would normally have in a FileMaker calculation. It may take some time and some tinkering to get things working exactly the way you want it, but it does offer quite a bit of flexibility.
