Unique field made non-unique

April 24, 200124 yr

I previously posted this elsewhere, sorry if any of you

get deja vu.

I have a DB with a field, used as a key, that is set as

not empty, unique, strict. However, I find that a script

is able to change this value into a non-unique one. No

error is trapped in the process.

I created a tiny example FM database and script to demonstrate

this. If anyone wants to give it a try, please contact me

off-line at [email protected].

Thanks in advance for any help.

--

Mark

April 24, 200124 yr

The assumption here is that anyone doing the programming shouldn't be causing problems with their own scripts! wink.gif" border="0 Locking the programmer out of too many features causes problems of its own. Just do the check using a script. -bd

April 24, 200124 yr

Even if Filemaker had an option to prevent scripts from overriding the uniqueness, you would still have the problem of an error message being presented to the user saying that an error occurred in the script, at which point Filemaker would have no idea how to proceed, leaving the user in a puzzling situation. So, there is no real alternative to designing your scripts to prevent the situation in the first place.

April 25, 200124 yr

Author

quote:

Originally posted by LiveOak:

The assumption here is that anyone doing the programming shouldn't be causing problems with their own scripts!

Locking the programmer out of too many features causes problems of its own. Just do the check using a script. -bd

Hmm ... yes ... well ...

I guess I was hoping that somehow I missed the "option" called "don't allow script to override field settings".

Or perhaps that "option" should be called "don't allow the programmer to do stupid stuff without knowing it".

Thanks for the help, though.

In reading some more, and rethinking the whole issue, I see that I need to approach this differently. This field was serving 3 functions: last name alphabetization field (FM's sorting in Ukrainian is broken); family unique identifier (identify sisters vs. cousins); and familes file to children file link. I will break away function #1, and function #s 2-3 can be served with a serial number field.