Cascading Choices in FileMaker 11 Pro Advance

Question

Working with cascading choices in the new(er) FMP seems to be a little weird. My intention is to create a bunch of drop-down lists / pop ups that rely on the previous choice. If a user clicks on a Customer drop-down, the next drop-down (address field) will ONLY have related data for that customer street address. Once you click the certain address, the other state, city, zip, etc fields will be automatically keyed in.

This is done by creating two tables (shipping, customer) along with a table occurrence of shipping and one unique value as a relationship in both the customer and shipping table...yeah. All of this is very doable, if not a little convoluted; however, I was wondering if there was a way to clean up these relationships? Sorry, calling all FileMaker pros out there, thanks!

Answer 1

I'm afraid the answer is no. Setting up cascaded value lists is rather tedious and, to my knowledge, there's no silver bullet. You're lucky to have just two levels :)

Answer 2

If I were going to take a stab at this, I'd try to build the next level of popup contents by deriving the necessary value list from the records of a related table. Since the selection of one value triggers the next popup, you're finding entries in a predefined database made of multiple tables where the values are all the possible dropdown list/popups. It's a cascade engineered through layouts, find and sort.