Newbies farl Posted November 28, 2003 Newbies Posted November 28, 2003 With a Field highlighted, using Ctrl I, brings up an Index list, which I use all the time. My Index list contains a lot of one off items and also a lot of item descriptions I use regularly. Is there any way in FMpro 6 to cull unwanted items out of the pop up index list.
ESpringer Posted November 29, 2003 Posted November 29, 2003 You can't get them out of the index list, but you can set up a Value List to include items you like, and one advantage will be that you can set up a field to pop-up a value list automatically, without hitting Ctrl-I. "Define Value Lists" (under File Menu) will give you several options. Enter the items separated by returns; use all values from a field (which will work the same way as calling up the index if you do it without appeal to a relationship); or use a value list from another file (say, if you had another file of current products). If you have many values in that field and want only some of them, the trick is to work with values from your item field, but constrained by a self-relational join. Suppose you wanted all the values that appear in records created in the last year. Then, you'd create a self-join relationship. Make a field called Constant, such that every single record has 1 entered automatically (and be sure to go back with "replace" to get 1 into all the previously-created records). Meanwhile, create a calculation field cWithinYear? (say) that yields 1 iff the record is dated within the past year. Now, define a relationship AllWithinYear (say) that looks at the value in Constant for the left-hand key, and matches each record with any record that has the same value (1) in the cWithinYear? field. In other words, no matter what record you're looking at, any record within the last year will be related to it via the AllWithinYear relation. Now, you can define a value list that depends on this relation: use values from a field, and hit the "Only Related Values" radio button, choosing your newly-defined relation from the pop-up list. The only other thing you'd still need to do is to Format the field on your layout to display a pop-up with items from that Value List. (If you really want to decide manually which descriptions stay in the list, then you could set up the same relation described above, but make the field for the right-hand-key not a calculation but simply an auto-enter 1 that you can change to 0 on records whose values you don't like.)
Newbies farl Posted November 30, 2003 Author Newbies Posted November 30, 2003 Mr E Springer. Many thanks for your detailed reply, it is very much appreciated. As a newbie to FMP I have printed out your instructions and will try to do it over the next few days.
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