Number of characters used in a related field?

[tomlepk]

How many characters deep does the relationship go when pulling a referenced field. By this I mean I have a parent field with the content 18-730588-PX5151T730688 which is a calculation of USER ID & DATE & RUN NUMBER (ITEM & DATE DUE) to match up to the log entry(s) for that particular person on specific date(s). The problem I am having is that the parent field matches up to other children that have the same first characters (such as - 18-730588-PX5151T730674 will show up as a child when in fact it is not) but the last few are different so it doesn't pull ONLY those that are related but pulls all children that are similar in the beginning portion of the field. The children's fields are static and the parent field is calculated. Is there another way I can accomplish this or am I missing something?

Using FM5 Server and FM5 Client for Windows

Thanks for your attention.

Thomas Lepkowski

[tomlepk]

I was reading through and found that FM only uses the first 20 characters is there anything I can do to get around this.

Thanx again

[LiveOak]

20 characters. If you have a file that stores run number, why not use a serial number from that file, rather than the composite of run number and due date. Also, unless you have archival data going back to the year 1900, you could subtract some date from each of your date numbers (like 1/1/2000?) and make the numbers smaller. Also make sure that the indexing language for indices with and embeded dash is set to ASCII, otherwise the dash will be ignored.

-bd

[Kurt Knippel]

FMP indexes "words" (seperated by spaces) 20 characters and less, "lines" (seperated by paragraph returns) 60 characters and less.

What you can do is to seperate the long ID with some spaces, so that no single word is more than 20 characters and the entire line is less than 60 characters.

For example: cPrimaryID = USER ID & " - " & DATE & " - " & RUN NUMBER (ITEM & DATE DUE)

For more information, see my FAQ at http://www.fmforums.com/ubb/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=8&t=000018