searching with a large set of criteria

[stph6]

I have a set of criteria that I want to search my db for -

search one field for many entries. I want to return a set of about 300 records. I have not been successful in getting a large "OR" search to work. Can anyone help me. I'm new, so if there's any data I need to submit, please let me know.

Thank yoU!

[Vaughan]

OR searches are created by using multiple find requests. So if you had a table with a field CITY and wanted to find records where CITY contains New York or Sydney or Ultimo, then you'd enter Find mode, type "New York" into the CITY field, then make a new find request and type "Sydney" into the CITY field... and so on for all the ORs you have. Then perform the find.

[stph6]

Thank you for your reply! So this is the only way to search for about 300 things at once? Is there any way to automate it with scriptmaker? Seems like a huge time thing to enter 300 or more criteria one at a time.

Thanks!

[Ender]

Most people don't need to search for 300 things at once. Perhaps you can add a category field or something that identifies the records in that set, populate it, then just search for that.

[stph6]

This will not solve the problem though - it still means a lot of data entry that I would like to avoid. This is a sort of one shot deal, where I need to get a set of records out based on one field. For the future (I've inherited this db), I am planning on adding a category field. I would like to know if there's a way to script this, though.

Thanks

[SlimJim]

It appears that, unless you have some formula for producing your search criteria, you are going to have to enter the data whether it is into find criteria in a script or straight into fields.

Take some advice, learned by bitter experience, from an old "time-waster" - don't spend more time trying to avoid doing the job than you would spend on just doing it.

[stph6]

oh I hear ya on that one!

I'm creating the category field and copy and pasting each search for the data and entering the appropriate category..believe I won't have to do this again in the future

coming from sql world - it's quite a change to using FMP - I'll get the hang of it eventually!!