Using a calculated field as a merge field

[StevenJay]

Hello!

I previously posted this message at the bottom of a thread in "Define Fields", but it may be more appropriate in this forum. The respondents to my original post suggested that the best way to accomplish what I wanted to do was to upgrade to a newer version of FMP. I upgraded. (Although only to 5.0v3 for now). After upgrading, I was able to solve part of my problem. I am trying to print mailing labels from a relational database. It consists of two related files, "household" and "dancers". Each household record is related to one or more "dancer". I want to be able to print one mailing label for each household which lists all of the individuals related to that household. So I defined a value list in my "household" file to contain whatever is in the calculated "full_name" field of *related* records. Next I created a calculated field in "household" called "CommaSeparatedRelatedNames":

Substitute( ValueListItems( Status( CurrentFileName), "Names" ) , "

[smorr]

What version of FMP are you using. I experienced this very problem in version 5.0 but it disappeared in version 5.5. I haven't checked version 6.0. I guess because it was an undocumented kludge, it got and undocumented fix.

Scott

[StevenJay]

Hi, Scott

Thanks for your reply. I am using 5.0v3. I just upgraded to this version from 4.1v3 in order to be able to define value lists based on the contents of related records. Now you think I have to upgrade even further in order to solve my original problem? Sheesh, sure hope it works!

Thanks again.

Regards,

Steven Nagy

[LiveOak]

If you don't absolutely require the names to be comma separated, but could tolerate a list on separate lines, it would be much easier to use a subsummary by household printed out of the dancer file using related addresses from household.

-bd

[StevenJay]

Hi, Scott

I upgraded to 5.5 and everything now works as it should. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

Regards,

Steven Nagy

[StevenJay]

Thanks for your reply, bd. This probably would have been an option which would have been suitable for most records in the database, but for those households with 3 or more related individuals the result would have been too big for the mailing label. Fortunately, the way I was trying to do it (merge field based on calculated fields and value list) worked fine once I upgraded from FMP 5.0 to 5.5.

Thanks again.

Regards,

Steven Nagy