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!

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.

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!

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.

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

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.

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!!