I am trying to make sense of a database of a large number of letters written by one or more people to one or more people, for example :

	Letter 123456 from John and Sue to Dave and Jane

In the table of people, John, Sue, Dave and Jane are numbered respectively 100, 101, 102 and 103.

Since the number of people can vary, I have a table linking the letters to the people. It records the letter number, the person number, and a number for the role of the person, sender (1) or receiver (2):

     123456     100     1
     123456     101     1
     123456     102     2
     123456     103     2

So I have three tables, one for the letters, one for the people and one for the links.

On the main letter page I have two filtered portals based on the links table, one showing the names of the senders and one showing the names of the receivers. This is fine, except that I cannot add records to the portal since FMP will not allow the modification of the field containing the sequence number of the people.

I have several thousand people, so need to have drop-down lists in the portals.

I guess there must be a solution, but I can't find it!

Andrew Brown