Repetitive names replacement shortcut

[Gerdie De Beer]

We are building a database of all South African wineries and their wines. In the wine's text description, you would typically enter "Zevenwacht Sauvignon Blanc" and in the next field "Zevenwacht Chenin Blanc", etc. This requires typing names like "Sauvignon Blanc" thousands of times. In the Mac OS System Preferences, Keyboard can be assigned to replace any typed "SB" with "Sauvignon Blanc" (for example). Filemaker 16 however does not recognise this solution. Is there an easy way to achieve this within Filemaker – or get it to recognise the OS replacements?

[Ocean West]

there are a few ways to solve this but it deepens on scope of use - if this is only geared to a few folks who are doing the bulk of data entry just to put the data in the I would recommend an OS software TextExpander or TypeIt4Me these could easily transpose shortcuts to fully qualified dictionaries.

Alternatively a redesign of your interface and library of words where if you entered {{sb}} or even %sb% or some pattern on field exit it would do a substitution on that string and then convert it to Sauvignon Blanc.

Or a portal of known varietals of wine where the user could pick form with perhaps a search or filter field to reduce the list of items.

[comment]

4 hours ago, Gerdie De Beer said:

is there an easy way to achieve this within Filemaker

The easy way is to post-process the entry using a script that does Find/Replace. To do it "as they type" you could trigger the script OnObjectKeystroke (untested).

If all the descriptions consist of the name of the winery and the type of wine, you could benefit by entering them into separate fields. Then you could use a drop-down list or a pop-up menu or even a radio-button set for entering the type.

 

Edited October 16, 2019 by comment

[Gerdie De Beer]

Thank you - will try TextExpander or TypeIt4Me first and see how it goes.