I am extremely new to FileMaker. I am a Director of Technology at a private school. I am looking to make a database that will automatically, randomly create a password for my students when they are entered into the database. The pasword would be based on the characters I define ( ie. two numbers, 5 letters, 1 number).

I would then want to be able to print out a letter that merges the students name and password in the letters.

Is this possible for a brand noob?

Edited March 1, 200619 yr by Guest

IMHO such passwords are almost unversally impossible to remember, so they end up getting written down... which kills the security.

Better passwords are those that can be remembered by minimising the memory load.

Instead, make a table of four or five letter words -- hundreds of them. Then script a process that gets two words at random and separates them with two or three digits.

Example passwords: fish45soap, boat32dream, fish12dream, soap89boat.

You get the idea I'm sure. You could even use FMP's functions to capitalise letters or even substitute numbers for letters if you wanted to get really tricky (eg, f1sh45s0ap) but this makes them harder to remember.

Thanks for the idea. I love it. How hard would it be to put this together?

As Vaughan says, you'd need to get the list of words from somewhere. Perhaps an elementary vocabulary? A 2 digit number can be calculated with the Random function (a decimal between 0 and 1)

Right ( Random; 2 )

Combined with the GetNthRecord() function you could get random words. See that attached file. If you get a dupe, you can just retype the word and it'll recalculate. You might want to move up to 3 numbers however if you have hundreds of students.

RandomPWs.fp7.zip