Finding/Searching repeated fields

[MotherLode]

I have a database listing contents of various magazines and books. Each entry is listed in a repeating field with 200 repetitions (probably not the best way to have set this up). When doing a find, the records come back but the search test is not hilighted, forcing me to read every entry. A major PITA.

There must be a better way. It occured to me that some kind of a lookup via relationships would be the way to go, but I need some advice as to how to get started. The manual isn't much help on this subject.

Any advice would be appreciated.

[dkemme]

Think about changing your database. You could import the repeating fields and separate into separate records. You'll probably find the resulting database is missing some data, only the first repeating record has all the data, you will need to do a little scripting to get everything populated again. But you will end up with a database that you can use.

[MotherLode]

Wow. This seems daunting since there are over a thousand records and the repeated field have over 200 repetitions. But then I did create this monster, and I have heard many hate the whole repeated field idea. Is this my only choice here?

[dkemme]

I don't know if you have other choices but I recently did this with a database of 12,000 records of repeating fields that upon import to new database had 120,000 records and only took about 30 min to accomplish. May not be as daunting as you think!

[BobWeaver]

You only have to create two files and do two imports. So, it's not that bad. In fact, you can probably work with clones of your original file.