I’m building customized databases for my characters, places, items, etc. and I’d like to be able to have fields with dynamically populated pop-up fields. I know I can manually go into the values tab and enter everything there manually, but I’d like a more dynamic solution, presumably using Relations.
As an example: I have a character form which is a very heavily modified version of what comes with Author. I’ve added fields so that I can assign a character’s birthplace. What I’d like to be able to do is collect the names of all the places I’ve put into the database, dynamically pre-populate a dropdown, and then be able to just select the name of the town from that pull-down.
Is that currently possible within the database, and if so, how do I do that?
Papyrus doesn’t support dynamically populated pop-up fields but you could solve this task using relations:
You could use the existing “My Places” table to store all place names or create your own table if you want to keep them separately
Go to the “My Characters” table and edit its birthplace field (Database > Field Properties …)
Click on the “Relations” tab and then “New relation”, name it “birthplace” and select “My Characters” or your own table as the Primary table. Select “Assigns the link” from the “Doublecklick/CR on a record” popup, then click OK.
Select the “Place” field from the “Fields in My Places table” list, then “Update table”
Now when you go to the birthplace field in the character form you can start typing the name of the place and the “My Places” table will open up, automatically showing all matching places. Select the one you need and hit Enter twice. The “My Places” table closes and the selected place is linked to the birthplace field.