Open a second area of a form, when a button is clicked on a portal line item to fill in the details of that line item in Filemaker 11

In a filemaker 11 database, I have a layout with three tabs, Current Year, Previous Year and Next Year. The Next Year 开发者_JAVA技巧tab is used for planning the upcoming year. Each tab layout has a portal of all the course numbers that we offer.

What I'd like to do is add a button beside each course line on the portal (on the Next Year tab)that will launch another portion (either appear or expand if you will) of the same layout to open where all of the other details can be filled in for that specific course number (such as Section, Term, credit weight, instructor etc) and then by the click of a button, add this new record.

Any help would be appreciated.

There are a number of ways to do this. The easiest would be to have two layouts, one that shows the portal and one that shows the portal with the additional fields. You'll need another field in the portal's table that is a global field. Let's say you have TableID in the portal's table, ID in the layout's table and you have a relationship matching the two. Create another field in the portal's table, gID that is global and of the same type as ID and create a self-join between the portal's table using ID and gID as the match fields. The script that each portal row's butten executes will set gID to ID and then go to the expanded layout and adjust the window (size to fit). The save button on this layout will simply go to the original layout and adjust the window.

I've created a very simple version of this for you to take a look at. You can download it from http://dl.dropbox.com/u/115897/PortalExpand.fp7.