Chapter 18: Action Fields

Chapter 18: Action Fields Transcript

Throughout this tutorial series, you’ve seen clickable links in the data. You can also create these yourself to customize the lookup functionality in IDEA.

To start, open the Customer file. Right-click any record in the customer number field and select Define Action Field. The section option which reads Create Action Link to display extraction preview should be selected by default.

Next, you need to indicate which database you want to reference and search for the related data. Click the browse button and select Summarized Transactions.

Next, click lookup fields. This is the same idea as defining a field to join on when joining databases –in other words, which field provides the relationship between databases. The first thing IDEA does is provides a list of fields which cannot act as lookup fields because they do not appear in both databases. This is for your information only. Click OK.

The next screen shows you which fields are common. In this case, only one option is left, Customer number. Click OK to return to the Define Action Field dialog and click OK to run the operation. All the values in the Customer number field are now hyperlinks and will display related information in from the Summarized Transactions database.

Click the first record to see that Diane Burrows has a balance of $175.75 from her one transaction. When you’re finished, click Done to close that and then you can finish by closing the file.