Date calculation

[CWH]

Is there an easy way to calculate quarterly due dates? Most of our grant payments are made quarterly, but because some months have 30 or 31 days I can't just use 90 days in a calculation. Any suggestions much appreciated.

Chuck Hoblitzelle

EG Pediatric AIDS Foundation

[Chuck]

What the calculation will be exactly depends on how you bill, but assuming that if the invoice is created on, say, 12/19/00, then you want the due date to be 3/19/01, it's a pretty easy calc:

Date( Month( date_field ) + 3, Day( date_field ), Year( date_field ) )

This will work for the months of October, November and December, since FileMaker knows that 15/1/00 is actually 3/1/01.

Chuck

[CWH]

Thank you -- Works like a charm! I'm puzzled why I couldn't find info about this in the manual, in FM Help or on their Web site. Glad you're here as a resource.

Chuck H.

[Vaughan]

FileMaker Inc cannot put all of this stuff into manuals -- there is just too much of it.

That what interests me about "developing" -- the reference tells you what features and functions the development enviroment offers, and the better the reference the more accurate and complete the list should be. Perhaps a few examples are included in to illustrate a few tricks, but that's it. The rest is up to the developer to work out, because (let's face it) that's exactly what developers do, work out how to do things.

Should the instruction sheet for a screwdriver come with details for repairing car motors, microwave ovens and slr cameras?

[BobWeaver]

Unfortunately, you don't always know what is a Filemaker feature and what is just a side effect of some Claris programmer's programming style. I had a Filemaker 2 database that completely fell apart when converted to version 3, because a well documented version 2 feature had mysteriously disappeared in version 3.