I tried filemaker 5 and its relational database capabilities:

Assume you have clients with a unique login id in database a, you store their login session times in database b:

create database CustomerData, fields: login (type text), data (numeric)

create database Customer, field: login (type text)

Now, make a relation from customer to CustomerData with the login name as relation.

Created a layout in database Customer, add the field "data" from related database "CustomerData"

then type in some data in CustomerData:

user1, 12345

user2, 23456

and add

user1

user2

to database Customer.

Result: the "data" field of database "CustomerData" will be seen in the layout of database "Customer".

Now, lets create a few new users like "#user1" in Customer , "User1" or "-User1" or "user1$" or "-----user1".

Still filemaker will see the data of user1 in CustomerData as related to all those variations of user1 names I created above!

Is this a feature? I tried several other characters, everything which is not alphanumeric characters with a few exeptions will be ignored. I would not care about the upper/lowercase thing but it makes a big difference if I call sombody user1# or user1!

I then tried filemaker 4 and 5, both show this behaviour.

Any Ideas what I did incorrect or should I not expect a different behaviour of filemaker?

thanks

This is not a FMP problem, but a knowledge of Computer systems problem. Relationships have to be indexed, and an index uses a particular language. So, if your relationship language is set to English, for example, FMP will index all the letters of the English alphabet, and all numbers. So, it sees the difference between: “1 a 2” and “1 b 2”. However, “-“ or “#” etc, are neither alphabet nor number, which means they cannot be indexed and thus not seen by FMP.

The solution is, however, very easy! Go into the options of your two relationship key fields and under the option “Default language for indexing and sorting text:” set the language to ASCII.

This, however, is also explained in the FMP help files and hand book!

If you wish to use special characters in the key field used to link your two files, you must change the language for indexing for the key fields (in Define Fields) from "English" to "ASCII" in both files. This will prevent FM from ignoring "#" or "-" and solve the problem.

-bd

Thanks for the explanation.

And I promise to read more manual more in the future, sometimes they may contain valuable information.

philipp