Date fields & duration

[Maz]

2 date problems I'd welcome some help with. I'm constructing a military history database for a friend. One of the files contains 2 date fields ('start date' and 'end date')in which you can record, for instance, the length of time a Commander was in a specific job. I'm sure there must be a far neater way of doing this as I now realise that I cannot find dates or periods of time that fall between those two dates. Eg: Job starts 5/5/1915, Job ends 5/5/1917. How can I use the data in these fields to indicate that the job was ONGOING in 1916?

Secondly: it's not always possible to log complete dates. Eg: we may know that something happened in June 1918, but not the exact date. As a temporary measure, so's not to lose the information, I've made two additional text fields 'half date from' and 'half date to'. But is there any way of combining complete and incomplete dates so that they can appear together in a chronology? I've thought maybe converting dates to text might work some magic but I don't have a clue how.

[neile]

problem 1:

make a copy of your file first, in case it screws up

define a field called 'date range' as a date, with 2 repititions.

make a layout with the 'start date', 'end date', and 'date range' fields.

make a script with the following steps:

loop

copy start date

paste to date range, first repetition

copy end date

paste to date range, second repetition

goto record/request next, exit after last

end loop

goto the layout you created. press cmd or ctrl j to find all records, and run the script.

you can do a find in the date range field for any date range.

Problem 2.

I suggest always using the first day of the month for dates you are unsure of (at worst, you will be right 1 time out of 31). Define a text field, and use it to flag particular dates as uncertain.

[ June 28, 2001: Message edited by: neile ]

[Maz]

Thanks for your reply Neile (only just spotted it as I've been offline for a couple of weeks). I'll try your solution to my problem 1 in the next few days and let you know how I get on. As to problem 2, I'm doing exactly as you suggest already - just thought I might be missing a trick. Thanks a million anyway. Kate