13.2. Portal Filtering

Using a multiple criteria relationship as you did on Section 13.1.2 is one way to change what displays in a portal. But when you change the relationship's definition, every portal, script or calculation that uses the relationship will change, too. But with an option in the Portal Setup dialog box, you can tell a portal to show records only under certain circumstances (say they're unpaid invoices) without changing the underlying relationship.

In the Invoices database the Customers layout has an Invoices tab, containing a portal that uses the plain-vanilla Invoices table occurrence. If you look on the Relationships graph, you can see that from the starting context of the Customers TO, the relationship travels through the Jobs TO to get to the Invoices TO. That means the portal currently shows all Invoices for all the current customer's jobs. Looking at it another way, when you view a customer record you can see all Invoices related to any job that's in turn related to the current customer.