Find – FileMakerHacks

The need to isolate duplicates within an existing found set has often been a source of frustration for developers. A couple weeks ago we examined a technique by Ralph Learmont demonstrating that, contrary to popular belief and experience, the ! (find duplicates) operator can, under certain conditions, be coerced into isolating duplicate values within a found set.

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Here’s Ralph’s original statement of the problem:

There’s a quirk in the way Filemaker deals with duplicate records. This makes it difficult to find duplicate records WITHIN a found set of records. If you try to constrain the Find to the current set of records, you might discover extra spurious records appearing. These records have “partner-duplicates” outside of the found set. These unwanted spurious records will appear as single occurrences when you inspect a sorted column. Technically they are duplicates. It’s just that their partners lie “outside”, hidden in the omitted slab of records.

And why it’s a cause for concern:

I think it’s important to explain why finding duplicates in a found set is something that often appears to work… and it won’t be apparent there actually IS AN ISSUE unless one goes to the trouble of actually sorting results and checking for those “single-occurrences”.

While the technique was blazingly fast, it seemed to me there was something a bit voodoo-like about Ralph’s previous demo, as well as my attempt at simplification. Apparently Ralph wasn’t satisfied with it either, because he has provided a new demo (Find Duplicates in Found Set) showcasing a more straight-forward technique, and kindly agreed to share some of his thoughts about it as well. Continue reading “Successfully Find Duplicate Values Within A Set Of Records” →

Level: Intermediate, Version: FM 8 or later

Locating Matching Records, part 2

January 14, 2012August 24, 2022 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

January 9, 2012August 24, 2022 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” →