Say you have a bunch of auto-enter calcs, some of which have cross-dependencies, such as:

A = If(B>1, "YES", "NO")

B = C + 1

C = 1

You can see that A can be either "YES" or "NO" depending on whether B is evaluated before or after A.

Is there a way to know in which order these will be evaluated? I seem to remember reading somewhere that the field Creation order mattered, but can't find that thread now.

The reason I ask is that I have a set of such fields, all of which reference a common "trigger" field. Sometimes, I have to set the trigger field twice to get all the fields to evaluate correctly.

Creation order does often matter, but you may be able to bypass it by testing whether the prerequisite fields have a value or which field was most recently modified (using Get(ActiveFieldName)).

In the example you have provided, creation order doesn't seem to matter, even if 'do not evaluate if all referenced fields are empty' is deselected for A and B and they are created in alphabetical order.

Perhaps if you post your actual calculations or a sample file containing them, we can provide more explicit assistance.

FYI, the FileMaker 8.0v2 update notes http://www.filemaker.com/support/updaters/fm8v2_mac.html suggest a fix to this issue. I've not yet tested it however. I'm also not sure if the 8.0v2 fix will work for me since I'm still using Server 7. Are the calculations done on the server or the client?

1.2. Calculations

1.2.1. Fields that have auto-entered calculations depending on other fields no longer rely on field order creation for consistent results.