Text Flow between text field boxes

[pubdss]

Hi Everyone,

FMP newbie here. Running version 5.5 on Mac OS 9.

I've created a database to keep track of whats on my archvice CD. Each record contains 4 fields: Archive #, Date burned, CD location, and CD Contents.

The CD contents are copied from the finder and pasted into the text field for CD Contents. This makes each folder name on its own individual line. Some of my archive CDs contain over > 180 files. The list is very long. I have to turn on scroll bars however its still rather cumbersome. Is there a way I can create another text field box and have the contents flow from one to the next? Almost like a 2x column look instead of one long hard to manage text field box.

My next question is: when I do a find under the CD Contents text field for a particular folder, the search works and yields the archives that contain the searched item. Is is possible to make it so that only the item used by the search engine is displayed in the contents box? Currently the search pinpoints the correct archive CDs but I then must manually scroll through the file listing to determine if it is the appropriate item I searched for. Does that make sense?

Thanks for you help.

[Lee Smith]

Hi Gregory,

You have too much information in one field. You need to break this field up. Get the important information into fields of their own.

As you have discovered, copy and paste is a very limiting way to bring information into FileMaker. I recommend that you look at other ways to import your information. FileMaker can import a wide variety of file formats, not the least of, plain text. When you import, you can control a lot better what goes where.

The beauty of this list is you can attach small files. So it might be helpful for us to see a sample of the raw data, in order to assist you better

HTH

Lee

[pubdss]

Hi Lee,

Thanks for your response. I've got a screen capture of my fmp document. The CD Contents are files and directories copied and pasted from a CD. I hope this helps.

If I were to break up the information, could I still do a search (within the Find viewing mode) that scans multiple locations?

Greg

[Lee Smith]

> Thanks for your response. I've got a screen capture of my fmp document. The CD

> Contents are files and directories copied and pasted from a CD. I hope this

> helps.

> If I were to break up the information, could I still do a search (within the

> Find viewing mode) that scans multiple locations?

Hi Greg,

I have a suggestion before we get into this very far.

Why not use one of the Archive Programs that are available. I use a shareware program on my Mac called DiskTracker (its Free to Try) and it gives me a lot of information about my archives. I can search, print, sort, etc. It might be the easiest way for you to go. If not, you could always export the information as a text file and then import it into FileMaker

Let me know your thoughts

Lee

[pubdss]

Hi Lee,

The reason I was looking at a FMP solution was because of its multi-user ability. The plan was to create the search database and serve it on our FMP Server. This would allow access to the whole department. I took a look at Disk Tracker and I think its geared more towards a single user. That application also grabs all the contents of a volume, not just the highest directory. Grabbing all of the content may be create too much info per search.

I'm familiar with importing data from formats such as text. I'd probably copy and paste it out of fmp and throw it in something like excel or just another text document to import. Hope this helps.

Greg

[Lee Smith]

Hi Greg,

Well, I think the more you can break this information out into individual records, the happier you will be.

For instance, I see about 30 records in your attachment, not one.

Of course I would need to know what information you want to search and see, but I'm guessing that it is the [color:"red"] file names, and then once found, the rest of the information comes into play.

Therefore, the more you can separate this information ahead of time, the easier your FileMaker work will be. Any tool that would help you accomplish your goal should not be dismissed. Also, I found another archiver that might do this better called CDFinder. If I were you, I would check out everyone of them that I could find. The key to success here is how consistent the information and how close is it to meeting the needs of FileMaker. Once exported, a lot of times you still have to look at it in a program such as BBEdit to get it correct. Many times I us BBEdit and then Excel before I import it, just so I can see that I getting it the way I want.

Lee