Yesterday, a client asked me to make a collapsible list in FileMaker. Essentially, he wants a subsummary list that only shows the “child” data upon request. In my head I initially thought “FileMaker can’t do that!” which turned into “there’s got to be some way” so I told him I would try. I played around with a subsummary report to see if I could trick it into displaying what I wanted. The problem with the subsummary report is that the “child” data is in the body part definition. So once you omit all the child records, the parent goes away. I need a way to keep the parent record, and hide the children. I was in the middle of compiling an email to my client telling him it’s not possible, and giving him a list of other work-arounds (popup windows, tooltip, ect) when it hit me: The only way to make this work is to have all the data in one table. In this example list, I want to show dog breeds (parent), and then under each breed a list of all of its possible variations or mixes(children). So I made a shadow table that has foreign key to the breed table, a foreign key to the variation table, a sort field, and an action field.

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