Simple way to find max of alphabet

March 13, 200322 yr

Just had an interesting problem. I had the need to find the "max" of an alphabet character, one per record, related to its associated part number. Background... this new customer uses letters for Revision levels of his drawings. A is first B second, and so on. We need to know the current release of any drawing (highest letter in alphabetic order), so we need to find essentially the "max" of the rev level field in alphabetic sequence and have that available to all part numbers in the file... Now having said that I accomplished it already by using a huge case file converting the letter to number then using the obvious methods, max number, etc to get to the solution, then once there converting it back to text, not an elegant solution, but works and I can get the data to other related files simply based on the part number. So on to my question, anybody have a simple calc to sort by alphabetic sequence without third part ascii conversion mod's, seems to me there must be a better way than brute force Case conversion, or am I expectting too much from FMP.

March 13, 200322 yr

Check the attachment.

I think it suits your needs.

OK, so attach file doesn't work.

It's easy to implent it.

Supposing you have some field that identfy drawings form same serie like squence or whatever, define an self relationship "SelfRel"on this field. Set sort order (sort related records option) for this relationship on your field of interest and make it descending.

Finally define field maxtext=SelfRel::yourTextField

or if you prefer to have ID of record

maxTextID=SelfRel::ID

wher ID is unique identifier of the record.