Field order in import mapping

[Chris Wood]

When importing data from another FileMakerPro file, the fields from the source file appearing in the import field mapping dialogue on the left side are in creation order. Is it possible to force these to appear in alphabetical order.

Changing the order in the source file does not seem to have any affect.

Your help would be appreciated.

Chris

[harryk]

No answer to your question.. Some experimenting learns that the left pane seems stuck on the 'creation'-order of the fields in the file to read.

Changing the custom-order in the readfile does not help as the creation-order prevails.

This can be cumbersome when a lot of fields are there as is my experience also. There seems to be no option to change this, at least not obvious.

Harryk

[SteveB]

This is a really bad design flaw that has been around for awhile. It's a real pain to use if you have a lot of fields.

I hate to keep coming back to the same thing, but it proves the point that those clowns don't care about fixing things. If they had to use their own product to solve real-world issues, instead of dealing with test databases, these types of issues would have been fixed versions ago.

[harryk]

The same applies to when you have got a lot of lay-outs and you want to re-order them. I do not know whether this is fixed in version 6, but if you want to move a lay-out you have that tiny screen, and when it moves, it moves reeaaal faaast, and it's up. Moving it doooown, it is down. The lay-out is everywhere, but not 'in order', far out of order..

Then I wonder, if there was version 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 of Filemaker, why not adjust such clumsy design which does not even affect down- or upward compatibility..that's beyond my scope of understanding.

>> I probably will say this more then once <<

Harryk

[danjacoby]

It's fixed in 6 -- you can resize the box.

[SteveB]

Silly me...I thought 5.5 was supposed to have fixed resizing windows. At the rate they're fixing things, we'll be at V10.0 before we can copy script steps.

[Chris Wood]

I suppose that the difficult way to achiev this reordering is to export the whole database as a .mer file; open it in Excel; reorder the fields in to the desired order and create a new database.

What a bore.

Chris

[CobaltSky]

Actually, you could achieve the same effect without using Excel if you specify the desired field order when you export the records.

Though a bit easier, it's still not an elegant solution, I'm afraid.

[Chris Wood]

Your dead right

Regards,

Chris