> It sounds like something else is happening...
> or is there as custom alue list somewhere?
I don't think anything else is happening, and it's a very bare bones file. I think I found the root of the problem. In the FileMaker help file, it states:
FileMaker Pro sorts value list items created from values in a field
alphabetically, and duplicate values are not displayed.
This seemed to crush my hopes at first blush, but then I came up with a solution that wound up working! While no one is going to accuse me of finding the simple way to do it, here's my solution; hopefully it may do someone some good down the road (plus, I'd love to see if there's a simpler way to do it).
First, a little more background on the problem: each of my text entries begins with a TEXT representation of the date the entry was made, then the entry text itself. Dates, of course, do NOT sort well as text - December appears before February, years don't come into play, and so on. Since I need to sort with the most recent dates first, I had to generate a sort key that would work for me. In the History file, I created a SortKey field, calculated as follows:
NumToText(
Mod(
1000000000,
Year(Date)*10000+Month(Date)*100+Day(Date)+
(Hour(Time)+Minute(Time)/60+Seconds(Time)/3600)/100
)
)
This generates a number that, up through the year 9999 or so, will give a LOWER value number for the more RECENT dates. In other words, if sorted using alphabetic rules, the most recent dates will be first in the list, and the older dates will be last in the list.
Then, in my MainFile, I told it to build the ValueList with the following attributes:
- use only related items from the relationship to the HistoryItems file
- use the HistoryTextItem as the first item in the value list
- use the SortKey as the second item in the value list
- sort the values by the Second Field
There appears to be a feature (or bug, I'm not sure) in FileMaker 5.5 such that, when building a dynamic value list from related items, if you have the value list set to "also display values from", the second item is NOT included in the dynamic value list!
That's my FileMaker thought for the day.
Cheers!
..Chris..