Hi All,

I'm a newbie but have fallen in love with FileMaker!! One of the hospitals in our area started using FM for EMS run reports... I wanted to enhance the system we were using (Basically a word file..) to a database. Since the hospital was using FM, I bought a copy and started in... All I can say is Wow!!

Anyway, since the application is for EMS run reports where a fair amount of medical terms and drug names are specified, I was looking for a medical dictionary to help with the spell checking. I have searched the forum and the web and have not any product that states it explicity supports FM. I was wondering if anyone could point me to a product that they know of....

Thanks,

-Don

Hi Don,

Welcome to the forum!

The dictionary does not necessarily have to "explicity support FM". As long as you can get the dictionary text into a standard text file then it's fine.

You can import a text file into the dictionaries in FileMaker.

Have a look in the help in FM under dictionary, this explains how to do it.

Hope this helps and good look with FM!

Ed

Hi Don,

Maybe you can integrate something like ICD-9. Have a look at http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/datawh/ftpserv/ftpicd9/ftpicd9.htm#guidelines. I know also a European dictionary, MedDra, but I think it's only for translation.

HTH

Thanks for the suggestions...

I actually was able to find a good word list of medical terms on the web and then I downloaded from the fda.gov.org a list of the approved drug names. After running though a script to get just a list of words I thought I was home free... But it looks like there is a limit on either the size or number of words a user dictionary can have.. arrgh... I get to 2882 words (about 32K bytes file size) and thats it. The import function won't import it and if I make the .upr myself, FM can't open it once the list exceeds about 2882 (I tried it with 2882, just fine... 3000 and I get an error)..

Any ideas how to get FM to accept a larger user dictionary?? BTW I am using FM 6.0 with the latest update (v4) on WinXp. I found a tech note describing a similar problem with FM2.0... I figured they would have fixed it by now...

Thanks,

-Don

Also on the subject... What is the best way to find out if this is an "official" limitation? I am beyond my one complementary support question and I am not really interested in spending money to find out that this is a limitation/bug.

Thanks!

-Don

Just to finish this off. I found my card and used my one free call to Support. I sent them the files (they were very helpful and responsive) and they were able to reproduce the problem. As it turns out there is a size limit to the user dictionary and (as was reported in a tefch note for V3.0) in V6 when you import it will not tell you of the error, it just does not add anymore to the dictionary. In v7 it still has the limit but is reported to report an error now...

Oh well, so much for my medical dictionary .....

Do you have the number of the tech note?

It sounds very strange that the limit is so low. 3000 words isn't very many.

Article: 105731 (Can

Well that's fairly typical of a Filemaker knowledge base article.

"Yes, there's a problem.

No, there's no solution."

I note that the article was written six years ago and there's still no resolution. Obviously, it hasn't affected sales enough for them to bother doing anything about it.

This limit persists in FileMaker Pro 15 for .upr files.  I wasted my time creating a 100 000 "compatible" wordlist only to have it truncated at 2882 words during import.

It's very annoying as there doesn't seem to be a way to create a main .mpr dictionary file.

Hi Quito,

Your criticism is miss directed, you need to take this up with FileMaker Inc. How to Report a Product Issue or Feature Request

 

Lee