Newbie: How to setup a find in 3 db's with no rela

[HermanJ]

Well, a newbie question, I quess....

I've got 3 db's with locations (one with cities, streets and postalcodes, one with road numbers and "hectormeterpaaltjes", and one with numbers of "road-phones") (Yeh, I'm working for the ANWB, in the Netherlands). These db's have no relation to each other. The have some fields different (like "city" exists only in the first db, and some fields the same, like x,y coordinates)

I want to make a search form in with a person can enter a location by either city and street, or roadnumber and "hectometerpaaltje" or the number of the roadphone.

How can I make this three different files in one search form?

The result of the find should be stored somewhere and printed when there are four locations entered.

How should I set this up?

FileMaker Version: 6

Platform: Windows XP

[Ugo DI LUCA]

Welcome to the Forums !

You definitely didn't picked up the easiest to start with...

I would think you'd need a 4th file for your criterias and a 5th for the results.

The Criteria file, would necessarily be linked to your 3 other files, through a constant relationship from the related files to the Criteria.

Prior to the find, a script would loop through your fields in the Criterias file and check wether it is empty or not.

If there's some data request, then you'd use the Status(CurrentFieldName) and store each fields in a global Repeating gFieldNamesRep with , and its Value would be stored in another Repeating field, gCriteriasRep.

Now, consequently, you'd launch a script in each files that will :

1. Extract one at a time through a counter the fieldName

2. Loop through your fields and when targetted, set its content using the GetRepetition(::Constant:gCriteriasRep,gCounter)

3. Perform find

When all 3 scripts has been triggered and performed, each foundset would be imported to the Results.fp5 file.

If you need extra requests and Omit steps, then you'd need to adapt your Criteria file, so that :

- each request would be a new record, with a same Find ID

- each record is either flagged as Omit or Include

- the Repeating fields would be standard text fields

Then, the external scripts, not only would loop through each Repeating fields, but through each records for this Find ID.

A bit tedious, but it could work, with this need that your field names in all 3 files should be the same.

FileMaker Version: 6

Platform: Mac OS 9

[HermanJ]

Ugo, thanks for your reply.

Very reassuring that I didn't pick up the most easiest one. (So I'm not as dumb as I thought I was).

I'll will try (to figure out) your suggestion and tell you where I get stucked or when it's working. One thing for sure: I wouldn't have thought of this myself.