Finding your records in FileMaker Pro Part 1

So, you've entered all your customer addresses and contact numbers, now you need to find the specific Bob you needed to call today but you can't for the life of you remember which company he works for, or what his hone number is.

You need to do a find (or search) in your address book to get to the record you require.

Generally, when I write a solution I give users a find button and/or a quick find facility, but using FileMaker native functionality you would select Find from the View menu in a layout that contains the fields you wish to search on (such as a company record layout). You then enter the criteria for the search, this can include some special characters (Operators) and there are also a few things you need to bear in mind when constructing the find (see the next blog entry for these).

Find Operators
=    match whole word (or match empty)
==  match entire field
!     find duplicate values
<    less than
≤    less than or equal
>    greater than
≥    great than or equal
…  range
//    today's date
?    invalid date or time
@  any one character
#    any one digit
*    zero or more characters
\     escape next character
""   match phrase (from word start)
*"" match phrase (from anywhere)

The Although all of these operators have their use, the ones that I find particularly useful are:

… particularly useful if finding all records in a given date range (such as invoices for a month) where you might want to enter something like 1/4/2013…30/4/2013 to find all records in April 2013.

* prefixing a complicated serial number (such as an invoice number) where you don't want to enter the whole string, but concentrate on the bit that changes, for example *110 where an invoice number might be something like inv00110


// to find records with today's date without having to key the whole date.




In the next blog entry I will give some hints  and tips on how to build your finds