Good evening.

Once again I find myself stumbling over something that I think will turn out to be very simple. I seek the help of our Filemaker mentors for assistance.

I have a table with about 3000 records in it.
One of the fields is called "Type" and can contain any one of 7 different values"
Another field is "Gender"  (containing one of there values: Male, Female, Unstated")
Another field ("Duration") is a numeric value that can be anything from 0 to 300

I want to Find records whose Gender is male (easy), the numeric value in a range (also easy), but exclude all records whose Type does NOT equal "Assessment". I found that I can Omit the "Assessment" records OK, but then unable to then constrain the set to show just Gender=Male and a Duration value of choice.  After the Omit works, running a Find on the remaining records seems to undo the Omit.  So, I tried the Omit stage after the Find of Gender and Duration - still no luck. It seems that a Find cancels out a previous Omit.
One cannot do a Find on something that "does not equal" - it has to be an omit process. I am not going to do a Find on the other possible 6 values either - thats not a clean solution.

I have been unable to find a solution through Googling on the correct procedure and usage of the Find/Omit tools to achieve what needs to be done. I'm sure it can be done, and I'm just missing something simple.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thank you,
Greg
 

 

 

 

19 minutes ago, Greg Hains said:

I found that I can Omit the "Assessment" records OK, but then unable to then constrain the set to show just Gender=Male and a Duration value of choice.  After the Omit works, running a Find on the remaining records seems to undo the Omit.

Well, running a Find is one thing and constraining a found set another - so it's not clear what exactly you're doing here.  Any Perform Find will undo the results of previous finds- unlike Constrain Found Set or Extend Found Set.

 

19 minutes ago, Greg Hains said:

exclude all records whose Type does NOT equal "Assessment".

This is even more confusing: doesn't "exclude all records whose Type does NOT equal "Assessment"" mean the same thing as "find only records whose Type IS "Assessment""? Why would there be a need to omit anything?

 

 

Edited August 31, 20178 yr by comment

It may be less than  obvious but the FIND requests should be BEFORE the OMIT requests.

Each find and omit request is ADDITIVE/DEDUCTIVE, and multiple field entries in the same find request are COMPOUNDED together so that all entries must match.

Your search procedure should go:

1. Find
2. Omit (if necessary)
3. Constrain (if necessary)

The constrain requirement can be used as part of the find request by specifying the field value, ergo [Type ≠ "Assessment"]

In your specific example I don't see a need to use Omit or Constrain as you can get all 3 search criteria in a single find request.

Any clearer?

Edited August 31, 20178 yr by IdealData
typos