Tag: Escape

Level: Intermediate, Version: FM 8 or later

Locating Matching Records, part 2

Kevin Frank

Note: FileMaker 12, released a few months after this article was written, introduced a “Find Matching Records” step, effectively eliminating the need for the techniques explored below (except for the section on case-sensitive searching).

Have you ever right-clicked into a field (or Ctrl-clicked if on a Mac) and chosen Find Matching Records? It works remarkably well, but oddly enough, there is no scripted equivalent for this command.

Of course if we do a Find Matching Records and then invoke Modify Last Find…

…we can see what FileMaker is doing behind the scenes. Continue reading “Locating Matching Records, part 2” →

Level: Beginner, Version: FM 8 or later

Locating Matching Records, part 1

Kevin Frank

Note: FileMaker 12, released a few months after this article was written, introduced a “Find Matching Records” step, effectively eliminating the need for the techniques explored below.

Sometimes a seemingly-simple FileMaker challenge turns out to be more nuanced and educational than first impressions might indicate. This happened recently when I was asked to help make a scripted search behave properly. Most of the time, the existing routine worked correctly, but on certain records it would fail.

The challenge: Click a button to find all records with the same Note text as the current record.

No problem — how hard could that be? Any competent FileMaker developer can do this in his or her sleep, right? Well sometimes properly defining the problem turns out to be half the battle. Later, after the smoke had cleared, I built a demo to explore various approaches one might take…

…and we’ll get to that in a minute, but right now let’s look at the original script and the problem, or rather, series of problems, as they initially unfolded. Continue reading “Locating Matching Records, part 1” →