FM_n00b

Hi guys, I have FMS Advanced 10 running on a dedicated server (IIS) and FMP10 installed on various machines on the same network, some of which are Macs and some of which are PCs. In my database I have date fields, among other things. My problem is that when entering a date in a date field on a PC, filemaker requires that the date be input in the form of DD/MM/YYYY whereas on a Mac it requires the form YYYY/MM/DD. This is also how the date is displayed on the respective machines, regardless of how I have actually entered the data. I need consistency here as much of the data entry is done by importing excel tables, and there are some date calculations being performed as well. Any ideas on what i could do?

comment: THANK YOU! i already had it set up with a bunch of portals but i didn't know that you can set the portals to slide up, which is why i was trying this method! problem solved, sorry for the redundant post guys!

so my Temp table would contain all of the possible fields that I might want to print in the report, and i would create a script that goes to each layout, performing finds and importing records to that table, perhaps setting another field to a layout_ID and then produce a report based on layout_ID?

Ok so the tables (sorry it's 8 not 9) and columns that i need in the report are: Instructional Activities -Name -Year -Course -Description -Term Supervision -Name -Year -Student Supervised -Type of Student -Start Date -End Date Committees -Name -Year -Committee -Department -Role -Degree Grants -Name -Year -Agency -Type -Amount Publications -Name -Year -Type -Title -Journal -Citation Presentations -Name -Year -Type -Category -Citation Staff -Name -Year -Position -Office -Department Activities -Name -Year -Special Contributions -Citizenship -Research -External Service This is a database for professors at a university. There are many reports that I need to produce from this data, but this is the only one that needs to pull information from all of the tables. This is not all in one table because a member of faculty may teach 5 courses, publish in 20 journals and supervise 8 students in one year, while another may teach one course, not publish anything and supervise two students.

I have a DB with 9 tables, all related by Name and Year. I would like to produce a report that pulls all records from all nine tables that match a Name and ID that i enter, but I am having trouble doing this without the use of portals (which I cannot use because you have to specify their length, and some names have more results than others so this causes problems when printing). Should I be using 9 subsummary parts, one for each table and then have all of the fields that i want outputted in the body? All I have been able to produce is a report of the FIRST record from each table that matches the name. I feel like this must be easy to do, some help would be greatly appreciated! Here is an example of the output I would like to achieve: Name, Year Table1 Record 1 Record 2 Table2 Record 1 Record 2 Record 3 Record 4 Table3 Record 1 etc..

great point, i will look into having a way or re-ordering the species should one be removed (although one would only ever be removed if it went extinct!)

ok well i think i deserve more credit than you are giving me as far as my ability to comprehend. anyway, i have managed to successfully solve this problem and it now works flawlessly. i created a numerical Species ID that is unique to each species, then all that i had to do was insert a "New Inspection" button that runs the following script: New Record/Request Go to Layout["Species"] Set Variable[$$Species;Value:Get(TotalRecordCount)] Go to Layout [original layout] Go to Portal Row [First] Set Field [Occurences::SpeciesID; $$Species] Loop Set Variable [$$Species; Value:$$Species-1] Go to Portal Row [Next] Set Field [Occurences::SpeciesID; $$Species] Exit Loop If [$$Species=1] End Loop Commit Records/Request Go to Portal Row [First] Go to Field [inspections::Name] what this does is count the number of species then create a new portal row for each species while subtracting 1 from a variable. the bit after the end of the loop is to make sure that the portal is sorted, the portal is scrolled to the top and then the cursor is in the name field. and that was it, everything is working beautifully now, thanks a lot for your help guys!

I'm having trouble wrapping my head around this. should i insert a portal in the occurence layout, have a New Record button in Inspections that Go to layout(occurences) Go to portal row(first) Show all records or something and then... make a loop that somehow creates new records and populates two fields (recordID and species)?

i REALLY appreciate all of your help, i have managed to get it working quite well, as seen in the file below (it is 5mb so i couldn't attach it to the post) http://wirenet.mcmaster.ca/focus/WMI.fp7 now my only problem is that i have to manually select each plant that was seen from a drop-down list, whereas i would prefer to have each new Inspection record trigger the creation of 95new Occurence records that are pre-populated with each species, which are then shown in a portal that allows me to simply check off whether or not that plant was seen. any tips on how this could be done? my gut tells me to make a script that would somehow create all 95 records and then cycle through them, filling in the inspection ID and the species, but i'm sure that there is a simpler way to do this that i have not thought of?

i do not understand why i would need a third table, or how it would work. my search for "survey" yielded only a few similar questions, but did not provide many answers so my apologies for re-asking: Say i was to use your three tables Species, Inspections and Occurences, would the user have to enter an Inspections layout, enter their name, location and date, then switch to an Occurances layout and select their associated Inspection occurance and finally enter the species that they encountered? If so, i don't understand how that would be implemented as far as selecting their Inspection and I also don't understand if i would have to make a field for each species and then the user would populate it with a 1 or 0 ?

doesnt that have the limitation that i can only have one checkbox? my checkbox list has 90 checkboxes, and the calculation depends on exactly which boxes are checked

thank you for your help. i have already fixed the one-word problem by using: LeftWords(Get(ScriptParameter);WordCount ( Get (ScriptParameter) )-1) so that it takes every word except the last word from the script parameter. although i still don't know how to get the table names using a function, i will have to just remember not to change table names for now. my only problem that remains is the cancel button. is there a way of making a global variable that will store the last layout visited, so that the cancel button can just go to layout name by calculation and then it could just =global field ??

thank you, this works great except: -it only works if the layout has a one-word name, -table:keyID doesnt work, so i had to replace it with the actual table name (eg Contracts::keyID) manually in each layout. is there a way of calling the table name like Get(TableName)? -the cancel button still successfully exits the script but does not return to the original layout, i think this is because the cancel button is initiated in the Delete layout, so the "original layout" that i am returned to is the same one.

Hi all, I am recreating the form below in FM: http://wirenet.mcmaster.ca/indicators/wmi_form_v.html each row in the table is a species of plant that the user can check off to confirm having sighted when doing research. each species has a "U" value and a "T" value that are added to two running sums when the associated checkbox is checked. the running sums are then divided to give the WMI value at the bottom Here is an example of the Java code for a particular row: if (document.getElementById("ELAC").checked==true) { wmi_top+=12; wmi_bottom+=3; } wmi_val=wmi_top/wmi_bottom; In FM, I have two tables: WMI - has columns Species, U-value and T-value Calc - has columns Name, Lat, Long, Calculated Value and a field that shows a value list from the Species column in the WMI table as a checkbox set. What I dont know how to do is: Have a checked item add a value (eg 2) to one running sum and another value (eg 3) to another running sum Make sure that unchecking a box will remove the associated values from the running sums This was all easy to do in Java, but how can I do it in FM?

nobody has any idea?