Post Hoc Record Creation / Modification Date?

[xochi]

Is there any way to add Creation Date and Modification Date fields to a table and have them take on the correct values, months after I've created the record?

[Lee Smith]

Been there and done that.

Nope. Although you might be able to establish a creation date by looking at other dates in the file, or by looking at records in the order they were created "Unsorted" (i.e. dates in a record before or after), you are pretty much SOL, (sh*t out of luck).

Lee

[xochi]

I'll have to add this to my list of "must have" fields in every table -- things that you will someday need and will curse for not having.

At a minimum:

Serial Number

Creation Timestamp

Modification Timestamp

I also would ad

ForeignImportKey (if this data was imported from another table, import the unique key from that table. Someday you'll want to grab another field from that table, and this makes it easy as pie)

Any others?

[xochi]

Been there and done that.

Nope. Although you might be able to establish a creation date by looking at other dates in the file, or by looking at records in the order they were created "Unsorted" (i.e. dates in a record before or after), you are pretty much SOL, (sh*t out of luck).

Lee

It's my belief that "Unsorted" is always in creation order, i.e. first record first.

Is that ever not true, i.e. what if you delete a bunch of records in the middle, then create new ones?

[LaRetta]

Any others?

CreatedBy and ModifiedBy

Egg on face when Management asks who created a record and I didn't know. I let it only happen once ... :wink2:

[T-Square]

With regard to the unsorted order: I believe they're always in creation order no matter what. Filemaker uses a hidden RecordID number to absolutely identify a record, and these numbers aren't reused unless you clone a file and import, at which point bets are off.

David