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Working with related tables and files
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ILEMAKER PRO HELP 377
the match field, a record in the Customers table can display a portal showing each invoice with a
matching Customer ID, and in the Invoices table each invoice with the same Customer ID can
display consistent customer data.
Match fields must be one of the following field types:
• text
• number
• date
• time
• timestamp
• calculation (with a text, number, date, time, or timestamp result)
Notes
• Container fields, summary fields, and calculations returning a container field as a result
cannot be used as match fields.
• The match fields used in a relationship can have different names.
• A match field can be a global field.
• Values are matched based on their indexing.
• To force match fields to consider non-alphanumeric characters, change the default
language of the match fields to
Unicode. See Defining field indexing options and Choosing
a language for indexing or sorting.
• A match field used for a relational database can be a lookup target field, as long as the
lookup isn't based on a relationship that involves the match field.
• You can increase the number of possible matching values by entering multiple values in the
match field, separated by carriage returns. You can access related data by matching any
single line of your match field, according to your relationship criteria. This is sometimes
called a
multi-key field or complex key field.
For example, you have a simple relationship joining records in TableA to TableB based on the
contents of a single field in each table, and the match field in TableA contains the following
values, separated by carriage returns:
red
green
blue
FileMaker Pro will match any record in TableB where the corresponding match field contains the
single value
red, green, or blue. However, FileMaker Pro will not return records where the
match field contains the value
red green blue. The carriage returns tell FileMaker Pro to
treat each line as a separate value.
• You can also see and work with data from external ODBC data sources. See Accessing
external data sources for more information about working interactively with data in SQL
tables.
Related topics
About relationships
About planning a database
About the types of relationships
Creating relationships