Ran out of real estate

[lionheartwright]

I need help with a layout. I ran out of room on the layout. I'm using FM9 on a PC. I have a Work Order layout with the usual stuff at the top of the page (project name, dates, people, quote number, etc.) and at the bottom of the page I have a portal holding the work order line items. I started out with 25 rows. Last week, one of the planners came and said she is writing a word order that will have over 150 rows.

When I went to add them FM said I had gone beyond the maximum layout size. What can I do?

[AHunter3]

It sounds like you are trying to put all 25 rows' worth of information in your Orders table?

It doesn't belong there; you end up with a HUGE ungainly batch of fields like Item01 Name, Item02 Name, Item03 Name, etc plus Item01 Price Item02 Price... does this sound a bit like your database? Or are you putting the line items in a related table, using a PORTAL, but you can't make the portal tall enough to accomodate that many rows?

If you're not (yet) using a portal:

No FileMaker database created in any version newer than FileMaker Pro 1.0 has any excuse for such a structure. Sorry, but it's true. It's not how relational databases are done. You want instead an Order Line Items TABLE which is RELATED to the orders table. One and only one Item Name field. One and only one Item Price field. As many order rows as you want: 25, 250, 250 million, doesn't matter.

If you ARE using a portal (and you need to know this also if you are not):

you don't need to see them all on the data entry page. You create a portal to Order Line Items from Orders, after setting up the new table and setting up the relationship.

Relationship:

Orders............ Orders Line Items

Order ID = Order ID <—— on this side of the relationship, tick the checkbox "allow record creation in this table via this relationship"
--------------------------------------------------------------

The portal can be set to show only 15 portal rows or thereabouts, and put a scrollbar. When someone wants a 150 item order, they just use the scroll bar to scroll down to the first empty row and keep on doing data entry.

To PRINT the order, you do of course want them all to print. Create a printable version of your order as a layout showing records from the Orders Line Items table; in this layout all the layout elements above the portal are replicated in the HEADER (or the Title Header if you only need them on page 1), the labels for the column names in the Header AND Title Header (if you're using a Title Header), then the fields from the portal are in the Body part which is sized as a skinny one-row body part and you set up the layout to operate as a List View. Any sum fields that do totals are put below the Body part in the Trailing Grand Summary part. Page Number and Date printed, etc go in the Footer.

Then to actually print you run a script like this:

Go to Related Records [Orders Line Items, show related records only, using layout "Order Printout" (Orders Line Items)]
Sort [optional; by date entered or whatever order you want them in, no dialog]
Print Setup [as appropriate, portrait or landscape, and page size, no dialog]
Allow User Abort [Off]
Enter Preview Mode [Pause]
Print [restore print settting, Records being browsed]
Enter Browse Mode
Got to Layou [original layout]

[chopper]

Another Idea is to have multiple layouts , your first layout as it is. The second layout Portal rows 26 to 75, and the third layout Portal Rows 76........ so on
When printing ... Print layout one , If the row #26 is not empty print layout 2 .... so on.