• Name change: Related Record Lists are now called Related Data Fields
• Smart Collections can now also be used as Related Data Fields
• Grid View has been added: displaying pictures in Related Data…
• … which makes most sense because of the added iPhoto integration
• Hidden Note Fields have been added to the field (drag the column titles to the left to reveal)…
• … and these notes are stored in the RD Field, NOT in the original records

Hope that helps.

no, you can’t do that. Go to the Bento forum and suggest this feature to be included in a future version. Make sure tech support acknowledges your request.

Is there a way to export a library to an excel file with its related fields from other libraries?

since you are so nice to me, let me give you some help too.

Try this: add one field to your new Donations Library: a Choice Field. Add all the names of the organizations to that field (the ones donations were given to). You can always edit that choice field later (adding organizations). Then you CAN add an organization to the RRL from within the Organizations Library, just as you wanted!

Tell me if you have more questions.

For my purposes, I’ve got a Library of organizations that my employer donates to, including contact information, notes, etc. I also need to keep track of each donation made to an organization, which was previously entered in plaintext in a “notes” field – horrible to work with.

What I’ve done is created another library called “Donations” with fields for amount, check number, date, acknowledgment, etc. – and inserted this into the “Organizations” library as a RRL.

Doing this, if I add a new donation to the RRL from within the “Organizations” library, there’s no way to automatically label the organization this donation was given to in the “Donations” library.

But if I drag the Organizations library ONTO the Donations Library as another RRL and on that RRL it automatically populates the name of the Organization from the other library. It’s not pretty but it seems to work!

The advantage of a relational loop is that if you add a record to a Related Records Field in one Library, it IS added to the Related Records Field of the other linked Library automatically.
To use the example of the tutorial: if you add a whole list of tracks to the related records in the Album library, ALL those records in the Track library will automatically display the Album name and Artist in their respective Related Records Field.

Sorry for any confusion – I hope this is totally clear now.

Best regards

A. Wolff

Thanks for noting that Bento 1 didn’t allow Smart Collections – I’ll add that fact to me new weekly series (going into Irish now…).
I did make one test (more to follow) and found that Bento WILL automatically remove records from a (Smart Collection-) Related Records List Field that have been removed from the Smart Collection (-source) – so technically there is SOME updating. So it’s not totally static in that situation.

When you create a relationship in a library that references itself there is no automatic updating because you’re not updating the ‘child’ library. With the albums and tracks, tracks can be added to an album automatically because Bento can clearly see that the albums library is the parent and that the tracks library is the child so particular tracks belong to a particular library. However, in a self-referencing relationship Bento doesn’t know what the parent-child relationship is so you have to manually manage it. You would have the same problem if you entered tracks into the tracks library in the table view. Bento would not know what the parent album for these tracks is so they would not automatically be associated with an album.

Using a smart collection as a source for a related records list is not implemented brilliantly because, as you have discovered, there is no automatic updating. In Bento 1 it was not even possible to use a smart collection as a source for a related records list so things are improving, just not quite perfect yet.