One of the items many of us wished for in new versions of FM was multiple comparators. Now that the wish was granted I was hoping for more.

In developing a relationship for a value list I filter my people table by the fields STATUS and CATEGORY. Where Status is Yes or no, and categories are Employee, Vendor, Contact, etc.

I can use multiple comparators of Status and Category but I first need to build a global field and define them as gYes="yes" and gCategory="employee".

Why did FileMaker not make it available in the relationship comparator dialog box to go ahead and define Status="yes" and category="employee"? It seems like a very natural place to do it, and it eliminates the global fields in the table as well. This gives FM the powerful query ability MS Access has with less steps.

Is there a way of doing this that I am not seeing?

It is especially helpful in our equipment database where we have Key comparisons with about 7 fields of depth.

I had previously requested this ability at FM and have redone so in FM7.

Thank you for any help you can provide.

Hi, E. I think i understand what you mean, but i think it's an awfully minor point. If i'm reading you right, you're comparing writing a SQL statement that says "[something] WHERE Status='yes'" versus creating an FM relationship between gYes and Status then entering "yes" into gYes.

True, in this case, there's slightly more complexity in FM than in Access. But (as you probably know) SQL statements can quickly get pretty difficult to parse, especially when you have multiple relationships/joins. IMHO, the way FM approaches this is just as powerful as Access and easier to use in general.

Just my 2 cents.

Jerry