Help with finding in date fields?

[heratch]

I'm suddenly unable to perform a find in date fields where I search for a range of dates ie: using the range symbol (...).

I've done this before countless times, but suddenly can't. This problem exists in version 4.1 as well as 3.0 which I tried re-installing and it still doesn't help.

Any help would be great. Thank you.

[BobWeaver]

What exactly is happening?

Are you doing this with a script? If so you may be using the Set Field step to enter the date range. This won't work. You need to use the Insert Calculated result step.

If you are doing the find manually, it's possible that the field formatting has been changed to not allow entry into the field.

[heratch]

Thanks for the reply. Sorry I wasn't able to get back here till today. I did find a solution, although I'm afraid it indicates a different problem. The following is an example of what I was typing into a date field in find mode. (1/1/03...12/31/03) This normally returns all records in that date range. The problem is that this action suddenly resulted in the dialog box telling me no records were found, when clearly there were records that it should have found. I tried this with several Filemaker databases I use and got the same result. Meanwhile, the scripts I already had in place to do the same thing (ie: find all records of a particular calendar year) still work fine. And, to make things worse, when doing the same thing on another Macintosh computer on a copy of the same Filemaker document, it worked fine.

I finally tried typing it this way: 1/1/2003...12/31/2003 and it worked.

Any ideas? Certainly, I don't mind typing the four digit year, but something's wrong when it suddenly doesn't respond the way it did previously.

Thank you for your help.

[BobWeaver]

Version 3 and version 4 had a Y2k problem. Filemaker released an updater for it. It's possible that some of your machines have the updated version and others don't. It appears that they no longer have the updaters for version 3, but they still have the one for version 4.

Here's a quote from FMI's updater page:

FileMaker Inc. announces the release of the FileMaker Pro 4.1v3 and 4.0v3 Updaters which will update FileMaker Pro 4.1 and 4.0 respectively. These updaters improve the handling of dates related to Y2K issues

[heratch]

Thank you Bob,

I found my updaters which I had saved on a CD and performed the update to version 3.0v5.

It works fine now. My mistake. Altough I had been using the updated version on my other machine for sometime (as evidenced by the 3.0), I installed the regular, original 3.0 from the CD onto my new MAC. Silly me, to think that I wouldn't require the updates.

This does bring up another question though.... if 3.0v5 works okay, why did version 4.0 have the same problem? Is 4.0 just a bad useless version?

Thanks again for your help.

[BobWeaver]

Filemaker continued to release some updaters for version 3 even after version 4 was released. Mainly because of the Y2K problem, I think.