This is a really stupid question.

Is there a maximum character length for a text field that is being used as a key field to another table?

I have a field that is made up of about 8 fields concatenated together. The resulting calculated value is over 63 characters long. I noticed if I make it 62 characters, it works and relates, but regardless of the characters afterwards, the values still relate, and they shouldn't.

Example

Value in field A/Table A (position 60-70)... abcdefghij

Value in field B/Table B (position 60-70)... abc1234567

These are the related fields. They show up as being the same.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

-Paul

FileMaker indexes single words up to 20 characters and a line up to 60. So separate your concatenated fields by either a space or an underscore and ensure that no single block exceeds 20 characters. If the result goes over 60 characters, including spaces/underscores, try to abbreviate the individual fields in some way.

My fields do have spaces between them. That's the funny part. Here is my field definition:

eFI_Fund & " " & eFI_FundCenter & " " & eFI_CostCenter & " " & eFI_WBSElement_all & " " & eFI_NetworkActivity_Network & eFI_NetworkActivity_Activity & " " & ePI_PRNumber

Besides shortening the values in the field, is there some way I can use a technical solution to 'cheat' the system?

-Paul

Hmm..

"eFI_Fund & " " & eFI_FundCenter & " " & eFI_CostCenter & " " & eFI_WBSElement_all & " " & eFI_NetworkActivity_Network & eFI_NetworkActivity_Activity & " " & ePI_PRNumber"

I guess, from your field names, that this is some categorizing purpose.

Then you could have an external file in your solution where all these categories would be in turn keyed in a 5 characters long key.

Then, by script or by some other mean, you'd populate the key so that it comes as :

C0001&C0210&C0059&C0014& " "&C0008&C0201&C0049&C0010

This is also valid for Multikey which would though be limited to 12 categories concanations in a Multiline/multikey sequencing, so that the max concanation would be

20words& "space"&20words&"space"&16words