I'm building a database in FileMaker 12 that will, among other things, keep a list of jobs (indicated by numeric ID) and the employees who had billable time for that job.
Given three tables:
Employee ( empName, empID, salary, ... )
JobHours ( empID, jobID, hrsWorked, ... , refID)
JobCost ( jobID, expenses, profit, ... , refID)
Where:
Employee is my personnel roster matching names to numeric employee IDs and stats (salary, et al) ;
JobHours is a list of employee participation -- whenever an employee spends time on a job, this table has a line that shows their ID, the job ID, hours worked, and a few other things;
JobCost is a daily record of jobs. One entry in this table refers to the activity for a single job on a single day. Additionally, each entry gets a system generated unique ID (since neither jobID nor date is unique) to relate to JobHours (resulting in a list of who worked on a particular job on a particular day).
I have a form showing records from JobCost. For each record, I can see in a portal, showing records from JobHours, who worked on that job on that day.
Now, the issue.
In my portal, I want to have a drop-down list of employee names pulled from a value list to create records in JobHours with the following criteria:
1) I need it to be a drop-down rather than a pop-up so it will respond to auto-fill from the keyboard. A drop-down will show the secondary value (employee name) from a value list while dropped down, and will respond properly to keyboard autocomplete on the secondary value, but once you've made your selection, it only displays the primary value (employee ID).
2) I need it to display names, not IDs, at all times. The pop-up does this perfectly. However, it doesn't seem to respond to the keyboard for typing autocompletes.
3) I need to store the numeric ID rather than the name.
I know how to satisfy any two of these criteria at once, but that's all. The whole database is working beautifully otherwise. Is this behavior possible?