Hey,

I have a database on people that are a member of our club. When people leave the club they get a mark 'inactive'. I don't want to delete those records from the database, but just never see them on any lay-out. How do I do this?

I know I can search and leave away those records, but this is a bit frustrating for all people looking in the database and doing their searches and having the 'inactives' come up in their searches as they are included in their home made searches.

tia,

Michel

I would force your users to search by script. Make a global field for them to enter search criteria, and a "go" button. The button will run a batch of find requests, setting each field that could be searched on to the global field one after the other. The final request is to omit inactives. The final script step is to clear the global field. I think the users would find this actually easier to use than doing their "home made" searches.

I do this in developmental databases that only I ever run finds in, simply because it is so much easier than setting up manual find criteria.

But if this simply cannot be done, you might save a copy of your database as an empty clone, make a found set of all inactives, import them into the clone, then delete them from the main database. You would then have a separate database with just the inactives. Relate this to the main database via your primary key, and the inactive info will always be available via script or portal, but they will no longer be records that show up in finds.

Steve Brown