In many cases I don't want the auto entered Modification Date to change when Replacing the Field Content of browsed or found records.

Unfortunately the "Replace Field Contents" dialogue does not show a checkbox permitting this exception.

How can the auto-enter Modification Date best be turned off when Replacing a fields content ?

There is no way to enable or disable a regular auto-enter modification date field, but you can create a custom DateModified field with an auto-enter calculation like this:

Case ( DisableModDate ; DateModified;

text1 + text2 + text3;Get ( CurrentTimeStamp ))

where:

- DisableModDate is a global which should be set to 1 when the field is disabled, and 0 when enabled.

- text1, text2, text3 etc., are the fields you want to monitor. You must explicitly identify which ones you want to monitor. This is either an advantage or disadvantage depending on your situation.

- DateModified is the name of your custom modification date field. Since the calculation references itself, you need to make sure the name in the formula matches the name of the field.

When you enter a 1 in DisableModDate, you can do it from any layout, but when you enter a 0 to re-enable the mod date, it must be done from a different table to prevent changes to the mod date in the current record.

I'm quite happy with your solution, it works well, but there still seems to be some kind of bug I can't get rid of

after having re-enabled the update of modification date it appears that the DateModified field of many records does not update, instead of updating the date in the field simply disappears.

I noticed that the DateModified field updates in all records only if the entered/replaced value in one of the TEXT fields I monitor contains at least one number, e.g. "345", "john 1", or "john1".

(the number fields work fine of course)

I tried a lot of things to solve this problem, but in vain.

I hope you can let know what to do about it.

Hmm, interesting. It doesn't seem to like the calculation if it can't find some sort of number in it. I tried changing it to this, and it seems to work now:

Case ( DisableModDate ; DateModified;

1+text1 + text2 + text3; Get ( CurrentTimeStamp ))