Format of exported data

[friendlygiraffe]

Hello,

This may not be the correct forum, I am new to fmp.

I'm exporting data as Comma Separated Text - this is how it exports:

"Darren", "Mcdonnald"

"Ben", "Smith"

"Gavin", "Richardson"

"George", "Brown"

 



But instead, I want all the collumns on one line:

 

FirstName = "Darren", "Ben", "Gavin", "George"

LastName = "Mcdonnald", "Smith", "Richardson", "Brown"

Is this possible?

Thanks

[-Queue-]

You'll need two new fields to concatenate the data. I would suggest using global fields and looping through the found set, appending each piece of a data to the fields. Something like

Set Field [globalFirstName, ""]

Set Field [globalLastName, ""]

Go to Record/Request/Page [First]

Loop

Set Field [globalFirstName, globalFirstName & """" & FirstName & """, "]

Set Field [globalLastName, globalLastName & """" & LastName & """, "]

Go to Record/Request/Page [Exit after last, Next]

End Loop

Set Field [globalFirstName, Left( globalFirstName, Length(globalFirstName) - 2 )]

Set Field [globalLastName, Left( globalLastName, Length(globalLastName) - 2 )]

Then export the globals.

[Vaughan]

Don't forget that text fields have a 640 KB character limit in FMP 6 and earlier. In FMP 7 the limit has extended to 2 GB.

This could probably be done easily with XML export. Unfortunately I know not how to do it myself but others may be able to help.

[-Queue-]

Good point, except I think it's 64 K.

[Vaughan]

Queue, I couldn't remember which it was, 64 or 640. I figured that it couldn't possibly be as small as 64K! lol

640K is the old DOS memory limit.

[-Queue-]

Scary but true! 64,000 character limit. 640,000 would be great for 5.5 in my solutions, but alas, 'tis not the case.

[Oldfogey]

Hey, Giraffe.

Is this by any chance a one-off?

If so, export as comma delimited Fname, LName.

Import to Excel or other spreadsheet and transpose rows and columns.

Export from Excel as comma-delimited.

Depending on how big your database is, I think you could have problems with the size of your two resulting records. Many text editors truncate at ?? and I think this is a system limitation not the editors' authors. I think ?? might be the magic 64k but not sure.

[friendlygiraffe]

Thanks OldFogey.. that worked a treat

thanks Wolfwood, but that's a bit complicated for me

[friendlygiraffe]

by the way, is there a way of change the delimiter to something other than a comma in excel?

[carlyle]

Wow, this is almost the answer to the question I was about to post...but not quite. I need to do something like what -Queue- was suggesting (but I think that the character limit will make this infeasible for us), but it is not a one time thing, so I'd like to make it as quick an user-interaction free as possible. Does anyone see another way to do this?

I have been searching this site for a while to see if there's anything about this. A different post mentioned using an ODBC link. I am embarrassed to admit that I have no idea what this is. I'm using FileMaker version 4, and I can't find anything in the help about this...is it something only available in newer versions?