Creating a Unique Concatonated Field

[Rheal]

first off I'll explain what I am trying to achieve with filemaker. I am currently creating an online contest that grabs information from a form (via CDML) and adds the information to a filemaker Pro Database. This has been created with few problems. Contests will be held once a month or so. People must enter the contest only once (check e-mail address if it is unique) but if there is a new contest they may enter again. I would like to keep the information in a central database. (ie. not have a new database for every contest)

This is my attempt at a solution. I am trying to create a field to concatenate the Contest name and the e-mail address together and then see if this text is unique. If it is not unique the field will give an error and an error HTML page stating they have already entered the contest will show on the user's browser.

so if the contest was contest1 and the e-mail address was [email protected] then it would concatenate the text as [email protected] and see if this is a unique entry in that particular field.

If the user tried to enter contest1 again it would give them "sorry you already entered the field" If they entered contest2 then the text would be concatenated as [email protected] and this would allow a new record in the filemaker database and give a thank you HTML file to the end user.

I might be doing this the wrong way and I appreciate any help people have to give.

Thanks in advance

[Vaughan]

There is a TechInfo article on this. Go to the FileMaker Inc web site, into TechInfo database and search for "validate calculation field" or something similar.

[Rheal]

I have found the article in question

http://www.filemaker.com/ti/104191.html

But the walk through that they give does not work in version 5.5 or 6 on my mac. Perhaps I'm doing something odd. It seems like a fairy straightforward walk through. I will continue to try and work through this problem. Thank you for your help so far.

[Rheal]

Well I muddled through the text again and found out that you need to make the keyfield a calculation of the two fields you need in order for it to work properly. (this was not clearly explained in the documentation)

Thank you again Vaughan for your support.