Do Find and Omit "clash"?

[Greg Hains]

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
 

 

 

 

[comment]

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, 2017 by comment

[IdealData]

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, 2017 by IdealData
typos