Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 4-9. The Edit Relationship window lets you define how a relationship works. It's di-
vided in half vertically, with one table's information on the left and the other table's in-
formation on the right. For most people, it's easiest to visualize a relationship when the
parent table is on the left and the child table is on the right. If your window is flipped (Pay-
ment on the left and Lease Agreement on the right), it's because your table occurrences are
flipped on the Relationships graph. To change the display, close the Edit Relationship dia-
log box and then drag the table occurrences to rearrange them. In practice, it doesn't mat-
ter which side the tables appear on because relationships are bidirectional (you'll learn
what that means on page 217).
Creating and Using Portals
Once your tables are related to one another, you can freely display related fields on layouts.
For example, say you want the Date Paid and Amount Paid fields from the Payment table to
appear on your Lease Agreement layout. You could simply add those fields to the layout, but
you'd quickly find a big problem. There's only a single instance of each field, and the point
of this related Payment table is to have
multiple
records from the child table related to the
parent table.
