levi777

I have a contacts database where people in our home office assign new contacts to our salespeople and sometimes update information of a record that the salesperson allready has. I'm looking for an easy way of showing upon the users next login which records have been updated or are new. I may be making it too complicated, but here's what I've come up with. First I check if the dateupdated > the users last logout (which is set in a script that runs on close). It that's true and updatedby or created by (autoenter fields) change I get the current user and if that does not = the salesperson I set a field called notifyOfUpdate = 1. Then I have an on open script that gets the current user. If the current user is the salesperson then I search for all records with notifyOfUpdate=1. I have the user click a button to basically add the records to the main database. (They're obviously allready there, but the button changes notifyOfUpdate to 0 so that next time they login they won't be notified of the update). OK, now my problem. When the user clicks that button to set notifyOfUpdate = 0 that in turns changes the updatedBy field to the salesmen and the time of the update. I can't figure out a way around this. I know this is exactly what filemaker's suppose to do, but I somehow want to make it so that changing notifyOfUpdate from 1 to 0 does not "count" as an update. Make any sense? Probably not, it's still early here. In the future (once I get my hands on a smtp plugin or if filemaker 8 supports it) I will need to email the user when an update or new record is made by someone other than themselves. Has anyone ever done anything like this before. If so, can you point me in the right direction?

I've seen a lot of examples for really good logging systems. They're very advanced and something that I would like to use. However, the database I'm building is based on a flat file database created in the early 80's. So we have some fields that contain A LOT of text. Keeping track of the actual changes to the field would basically make our database HUGE, which wouldn't be a big deal, but we use synchdek to distribute full databases to our sales team. Here's my idea, let me know if I'm on the right track. I want to track when any changes were made to a record, but not at the field level. I want to keep a running tab of who modified the db, as well as the date. So I'm thinking something to the effect of if dateModified (which is a autocalculation set to date modified obviously) changes I'd write to a log field, but I'm not sure where I'd put this script. I don't want to attach it to a button. Any ideas?

Hey guys, you've been a lot of help so far. I'll try to make this my last question for a while... I have a global field called gReport. There's a pop up menu with a valuelist of the names of my reports that I have in another table. I want to make it so that when a user chooses one of the reports from the listbox and pushes the command button I can somehow run a script that basically says: perform script(reports::scriptname) So it'd be a script that tells filemaker to run a different script that is named the exact same as the report name (these are allready defined). So to put this in a nutshell, I'm looking to run different scripts using a pop up list. Any ideas? Thanks to all...

Very cool. Thanks mr_vodka. I don't think I want the status bar in any of my forms since all the functionality of it is in the reports. Is there anything in Filemaker that is the equivalent of "on create" or "on open", where you can specify a script to run when the user first opens the database?

Forgive me for not knowing the exact name of the part of filemaker on the left side of the form that shows the modes and record numbers, but is there anyway I can make a layout that does not show this? I'm making a reports menu which will basically be a 400 X 400 pixel window with a list of reports. It will open on top of the main form. It's soul purpose is to select a report, so there will be no records in it, thus no need to display record numbers or browse, preview and form views. Thanks in advance. Hopefully this makes sense.

Hey - I'm have to do the same thing, and concantonating is working well. Am I correct in assuming that if I set the calculation field to "do not store" it will load that field at runtime thus not making the db any larger? Also, I kind of doubt this is a possibility when doing it this way, but is there anyway to highlight the found text? I wouldn't think so since my calculated field is not actually displayed, but you guys would know more than I.... Thanks

Wow, my bad... Thanks for straightening that out for me. My weekend will no longer be spent thinking about filemaker. Thanks all of you that helped out.

Hey Stanley, thanks for your help. I know that this is very basic, but I'm still not able to get it to work. A script that would have took seconds to make in sql has pretty much drained me. I now understand how it should work, but the second line set field - how do you enter two fields into it (tstate and gstate). I was only able to enter one. Sorry if this is frustrating for you guys, I'm trying...

Hmmm. Not sure I truly understand this and I've been doing a lot of research. Perhaps I need to find a book. I decided to use your idea of a dropdown box to choose the state and a button. When I press the button it runs a script that does a find, but what I don't understand is how to tell filemaker that I only want the report to show records from a particular state, and this report will often be for different states. Is this where parameters come into play? I haven't really grasped the whole parameter idea. I know that I want to pass the state to the script as a parameter, but can't figure it out. Do I need to set up a field to store the parameter? Thanks again.

First, big thanks to everyone on these boards. I didn't even know filemaker existed two weeks ago until I got this new job, but I've learned a lot from lurking.... Now for a possibly easy question, I searched to no avail... I have a report that I want to create for only one state. Is there a way that when the user clicks on the button to perform the script filemaker can prompt them for which state they want to do the report on? I'm sure I'm missing something here. Brain farts all morning....