"Traditional" Index

[DVA Berlin]

Hi all.

Being new to ths forum and fairly new to Field Definition and Script-Maker in FM-Pro I'm stuck with a probably very old problem:

For a database-based printed publication I need to create a "real" index ('got nothing to do with FM-indexing, I know), like in any ordinary book, which lists the topics, persons, places and the documents (pages) it is mentioned. Like:

Nero: 12919, 12949

New Wales: 12999, 13001, 13090

New York: 12800, 12999, 13091

etc.

The information is to be extracted from only two fields: The (however generated, individual for each document) "number" and the field "Index Entries", where each Document (the whole thing's a research bibliography infact, and there's no money in it to "buy" a solution) is supplied with 1 up to nnn index words.

The to-be exported index should (that's my dream) be sorted alphabetically and the appearing numbers should be sorted ascending for each entry resp. Like in the example above.

I'm sure this requires some tricky scripting, and I've only gotten as far as producing a value-list of the "Index-Word" field. But what now?

Any help or hint would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Bernhard Suchy

Berlin, Germany

[LiveOak]

What is a record in your database? A document? A page? How about a little better description of what the "number" and "index entries" fields are. Is "index entries" a list of index words? Separated by what? This is such a exact solution you are asking for that you will need to be very clear and specific about the structure of what you are trying to do. The is on simple, general answer to how.

-bd

[DVA Berlin]

I'm very Sorry for the inadequate description due to lack both of experience and FM-terminology in English.

Record was supposed to mean Document.

At the moment (doesn't have to stay like that) it's a simple single database with 12 fields such as Author, Title, Subtitle etc.

The "number"-field holds the ID of the bibliographic item (= the Record ID) (not calcuated, simple number), the "Index-Words" field is a Repeating Field with an open, not "closed" value-list (sorry for the terminology). -- The structure was inevitably inherited from an ancient DOS-based database. --

Final aim is an alphabetically sorted list (as an Export file) of all values of the "Index-Words" field with the ID-numbers of all documents they appear in, listed behind.

Oh, I'm afraid I fail to make myself clear. Sorry.

I guess the best start would be abandoning the repeating field an start looking for "useful" relations.