Hi all:

I've just run across a strange thing in a solution a client has been using for a year or so now. There is a calculated field which produces a job number in accordance with the client's long-standing practice (in the format ("Q-yyyy-mm-serial number"), and there is an automated Find built into the system. It has just come to my attention that searches using wildcards do not function, meaning that "Q..." returns nothing. Searches for exact matches come up okay. Is this due to the calculation? If so, what's the quick workaround?

Thanks in advance

Stanley

I would double-check that it's not set as a number instead of text, first.

That's the first thing I looked at. It's text. The behavior is (seems to be?) that it accepts the whole text string as a search RESULT (thus the exact matches) but the "-" (I'm guessing) gets in the way otherwise. Just a guess, due to the field being a calculation?

It won't kill me to figure this out on my own, but I'm going on vacation in six days, and I've got other fish to fry, so I was hoping someone had run into this before...

Seriously, make a calculation field that is a concatenation of other text fields, with "-" as a separator, and see if you can do finds in it using "..." - it's not working for me.

-Stanley

Both "Q..." and "Q" worked in the tests I just performed. How is the field indexed? What do you get if you click into the field and Cmd-I?

I had not been aware that ... could be used for wildcard searches. Good to know. Usually i use * and i'm wondering what happens if your client uses that, Stanley? Same thing?

J

J:

Using "*" works fine. Strange that I'm getting a different result from "..."

Thanks

-Stanley

Stanley,

I take it that, unbeknownst to you, the 'Q...' find has never worked?

I notice that you gurus are on different platforms - stanley's on Mac, the rest on PC.

Both "*" and "..." work for me on Windoze. BUT, I would not expect "..." to work in any platform. Is it documented as a wild card search method in any FMP doco? If not, is it possibly accidental and platform-dependent?

Using funny things like that always worries me. In the absence of any other evidence, I would interpret Find "Q..." as 'find values between Q and null'. (cf find '='.) "Find A...B" cannot find anything if B<A.

In my experience, FMP seems not to be too sure about where null belongs in the sort sequence - sometimes it's high, sometimes low and sometimes in between.