Charlie Kilo

Thank you everybody for the useful thoughts.

Hello everybody. I need to create a notes field, and I would like to know the best way to approach this. (The intent is to have a time stamped record of each interaction with our patients.) Should I have one big field, and rely on the users to timestamp their entries? Or should I have a portal relationship with a related "notes" table, with each new note being a new record? Is that best? Or is there some better solution? I imagine this is well trodden ground around here. Any advice will be appreciated!

That worked perfectly! Thanks, David! :-)

Hello everybody! I work in a dental business. I have made a little database to keep track of the cases we have ongoing. There's only one table: CASES. Each record tracks things like the patient name, the date of the next appointment, etc. The field STATUS tracks whether the case is "Live" or "Completed". I made a layout of the type "list view" so I can see all the cases on one screen, which is really handy. However, it currently displays all the cases, whether or not they are "Live" or "Completed". What's the best way to make this layout display only the "Live" records? My instinct is to write a script that runs a find request and executes automatically (somehow) whenever the user enters the layout. Is this the correct approach, or am I barking up the wrong tree? I am a Filemaker noob so if I'm doing this in a completely stupid and inefficient way, please do tell me! This is the first time I've played with list view. Thanks for reading and helping a noob! :-)

Thanks Martie! Worked perfectly.

My CRM database tracks mailshots sent out to prospects via a parent/child relationship. I have a portal on the "Prospect" (parent) record layout, which displays the "Mailshot" (child) records linked to the prospect. I'd now like to create a child record for a group of prospects all at once. I tried to do it by creating a found set and using Records > Replace Field Contents. But it doesn't create a child for all the prospects. Is there a way to do what I want it to, or am I going to have to rethink the way I've designed the CRM?

I am after your help, apologies for the oncoming incoherent waffle. I know little to nothing about Filemaker but I know enough that it could be the solution to a challenge my company is currently facing. I know so little I don't even know if I have posted this in the relevant section! I am trying to find out if my challenge is solvable with Filemaker and if so how complex would it be and what I should be looking to pay someone to do it. I know people might not want to answer in definitive terms what I should expect to pay, but a ball park figure of hours and an average hourly/daily rate would be more than adequate to help me budget. My challenge is this; My company provides a number of different engineering and compliance services to my clients, each client having it own unique blend of services. Each service is viewed as its own department within my company and with its own team and account mangers managing the delivery and reporting. Currently each department emails current project status reports and market data/reports monthly to their own accounts. This is diluting our company brand as there is no common formatting etc. Also each client could potential be receiving 6-7 different emails monthly from my company from different departments updating them on the different stages of essentially the same "project". It is a messy, incoherent process and one that we need to sort out. We would like to have one document that goes out to each client monthly. The document should contain generic market information but also specific information unique to that client. We could get someone to sit down and manually cut/copy/paste/format each document but that is not cost effective. I would imagine each department uploads the relevant client spread sheets, graphs text etc in a uniformed fashion to a database of sorts. Then from this information a "newsletter" containing everything usually sent out over 6 emails could be consolidated into one succinct well branded message. Either that or there is a web portal that could provide clients with their own "dashboard" of current project results etc. What I am after is. - Is this possible in Filemaker, or would another program be more suited? - How complex/difficult would this be -How long could a project like this take. A very rough ball park figure would do. Just so we know if now is the right time to start approaching developers for full quotes or not. - Roughly what is the average day/hour/project rate for developers. Again so we know if we would be wasting everyone's time by meeting with someone. I hope that all makes sense? If not, I apologise, please just ask for more clarity on a specific area and I'll try to provide it. Cheers

Thanks very much, that worked perfectly! Shiny_new_database is now populated! Comment, I need them in separate fields so I can export them to Royal Mail's mailshotsonline system, which requires the street address in separate lines.

Hello! I am moving data from old_database.fp7 to shiny_new_database.fp7 - however, the street address in old_database is a multi-line field named street_address. shiny_new_database has multi street address fields streetadd1, streetadd2, etc. So I'd like to make a calc field in old_database that gets the first line of street_address (and then another calc field that gets the second line, etc). I can then import from the calc fields. Can anybody help me with the calc formula? None of the functions leapt out of the list at me (I guess I was hoping for a GET LINE NUMBER function or something). Thank you in advance for helping a calc noob!

Great, thanks for the advice Mr Cooney. The City, State and Zip details are in separate fields - we're just talking about the street address here.

So I have an old database with the field ADDRESS. And a new one with ADDRESS1, ADDRESS2, ADDRESS3 & ADDRESS 4. I need to get the records out of old_database and into shiny_new_database I'm not sure what the best way to go about this is. Would it be to add ADDRESS 1 et al to old_database, then somehow split ADDRESS into the new fields, then import it cleanly into shiny_new_database? Or is there something clever I can do with the import? (I'm using FM10.) Many thanks to anybody who can give me a pointer. Best regards, Frosty.

Thanks for the pointer, I will check script triggers out! EDIT: worked perfectly, thanks very much!

Hello experts, Using FM10 I have made a "list" type layout. It shows all the records in my database. I would like it to only show certain records - records where the field DISPATCH_DATE has a null value. I am aware I can do this with an omit request, but I don't want the user to have to do this every time they access this layout. Is there a way to only show records with no DISPATCH_DATE? Thanks very much! -Frosty.

I have two fields: INDATE and OUTDATE. I would like to see all the records in my database where OUTDATE is more than 15 days after INDATE, but I have no clue how to achieve this! Can anybody help me? Thanks! Frosty

Hi guys! Hope this is the right forum. My table called CASES holds all the cases we've done for clients this month. Here are two of the fields it has: DATE_IN (date) UNITS (calculation, it counts how many units were in the case) Does anybody know a quick way for me to see how many units in total we received in April?

Hey Vaughan, Yeah, I have some other tables. Thanks. : Best regards, Frosty.

Hi everybody. Apologies for this very basic question. I have made a database with the tables CUSTOMERS (parent) and ORDERS (child). Each time a customer orders a product I add a new related record to the ORDERS table via a portal. The ORDERS table contains a date field, COMPLETED_DATE, in which I enter the date an order was completed. Now I need to invoice for all the work I did in February. What I would like to see is a list of all the orders completed during February, sorted by customer. Do I use a Report for this? Or are they just for printing? Again apologies for asking such a basic question. Kind regards, Frosty.

Wow, thanks Daniele. It was very kind of you to help me.

Hi Vaughan. Just being able to mark it will be fine.

Hey Daniele, 1). Any field visible on the layout. 2). The way I imagined doing it was dragging an icon and dropping it on the field you want to mark. I'm not sure if that's possible or even if it's the best way to do it. 3). The user must be able to do it. Thanks for thinking about this for me. Best! Frosty.

Hi FM experts! I'm putting together a small project tracking system. I'd like the user to be able to mark any field with a little "red flag" icon, to indicate an area of risk or uncertainty. Is this possible in FM? Thanks, Frosty.

Hello everybody! I have what I think is a very basic question. 1). The database is to organise my contacts by what "status" they are. 2). It has one table. There is a field called STATUS, which can have one of three values: COLD, WARM, or DEAD. 3). I want to see a screen that looks like this: == COLD John Doe Jane Smith WARM Bill Bloggs == In SQL terms, I'd run two queries (GET_COLD, which would find all records where the status = COLD, and GET_WARM). Then I'd display the output of each one alternately. But I have absolutely no idea how to achieve this in FM. I'm sure it's basic: can anybody help? Sorry if this is a stupid question. Thanks for reading, Chris.

Wow, thanks John. That's incredibly useful.

So my found set consists of some 70 people I've phoned over the past couple of weeks. I'd like to bring my database up to date by noting that I've made these calls against each record in the found set. My database has two relevant tables: PEOPLE and ACTIVITIES. I can manually add an ACTIVITY (the phone call) to each of these people in the found set, but isn't there an easier way to do this for the entire found set than to go through each PERSON record and create a new ACTIVITY child record for each?

Great, thanks John.