Not sure if this is correct forum, but im having a hard time understanding a FM concept.

What i want in my solution is the ability to prevent incomplete records from being added. What i envision is a "Submit/Commit" button that a user would press when all the information for the record has been entered. if there is any data missing or invalid, a message would relay that info.

Since FM commits a record's data after it is added to a field, how would this be handled?

I understand that i can set validations for every field, and i assume this is how i would handle this, but it seems like a lot of error messages can be generated if many fields are required and it will get annoying.

Is there a way to script a submit button that will check all the validations and only return one message, and still prevent a user from navigating away from this record and having the information added to the database?

Sorry if that is confusing! Fairly new to this

Don't let the user directly create records. Perform all edits in global fields, then have a "Submit" script check for validity and write the data to the real record only if complete.

Do both: use the "global field entry" method that BruceR suggests to create new records, but also have field-level validation to stop people from editing records and leaving them incomplete.

So would i have to duplicate every field with a global?

So would i have to duplicate every field with a global?

Yes. But note that you can use repeats for this. And - do your users edit EVERY field or is it just a subset that they edit while performing a particular task.