Find where Day = Mon or Wed or Fri

[Mandu]

I have a table of event records. Each event is scheduled for exactly one day of the week.

I want to find the set of event records for Mondays or Wednesdays or Fridays (or, in general, any combination of any number of days). Can this be accomplished with a single Find request; say, using a multi-key search criterion for eventDay? (When I tried it, it didn't work, but that doesn't prove anything : .)

Or does this require a series of Extend Found Set requests, like other 'OR-ed' criteria?

Thanks....

Chap

[LaRetta]

I want to find the set of event records for Mondays or Wednesdays or Fridays (or, in general, any combination of any number of days).

I assume this still must be specified somehow by year or month range? You wouldn't want to find ALL Mondays from the entire events table, right? And do you want to find this set of event records to view or to work on them, ie, display in portal and/or list views?

But yes, it can be done; how best to do it will depend on a bit more information.

LaRetta

[Genx]

While LaRetta is right (as per usual) that we probably need more inforamation - i'm gonna jump right in and make a suggestion - i would suggest using a global multikey as your request, relating that to a stored calc in your main table that utilizes DayName() [as usual, i'm hoping that's a function, if it's not, your looking for one under the date format section in calcs] Anyway, then relate your multikey to that stored calculation, and your script is to simply Go to related records over that relationship.

[Mandu]

Hi LaRetta,

The events (AA meetings) all recur weekly, ad infinitum.

An event has three searchable characteristics:

-- Day of week

-- Time of Day

-- One or more Types (smoking allowed, women only, oriented toward adolescents, ASL-interpreter present, etc.). About 29 possible attributes in all.

The search GUI should be simple, simple, simple. I set out three fields: Day (checkboxes), Time (morning/afternoon/evening checkboxes), and Type (smoking, women's, adolescent..., checkboxes).

I used checkboxes to allow the searcher more flexibility.

In writing this I suddenly realized I don't know whether to treat multiple Type criteria as ANDed or ORed. : hmm. Well, without deciding that, does that give you enough to go on?

Thanks,

Chap

[Mandu]

LaRetta - I forgot to answer some of your questions.

-- The found set of event records is for display only.

-- The display is currently in List view

GenX - thanks. I never thought of that. That will probably fill the bill. (Probably skipped over many solutions while searching archives, because they were all about relationships.)

[Søren Dyhr]

I would make searches for 1 in a calcfield looking like this:

Mod(DayOfWeek ( aDate );2) xor 1

--sd

[Mandu]

That wouldn't solve the general case, would it?

(The subject line I chose was just an example --- it could just as easily be day = sat or sun -- sorry to be misleading!)

[LaRetta]

The question is ... does the Events table have a DATE field or only a Day field? Because if you only have Day field, then ranges are problematic, as I've indicated. Do you have many of each day of the week and each is a different date? How can you achieve a 'range' of days and maintain logic? Example: Find Monday through Thursday. If you have multiple requests for each of those days AND if you have multiple dates then your result will be meaningless.

Once I have a vision of your Events table, I can provide and/or search on Type plus and search on range or specific days only.

[Søren Dyhr]

Since this is AA doesn't ranges make much sense LaRetta, I subscripe more to Genx' approach - I've made a template!

--sd

test.zip

[Mandu]

One record says "The High Noon group meets Tuesdays at 12:00 pm; it's a NonSmoking, Open Discussion, Women-Only meeting".

Another record says "The Hermitage Group meets Tuesdays at 8:00 pm; it's NonSmoking, Closed Discussion meeting".

Another record says "The Serenity Group meets Sundays at 7:30 pm; it's a NonSmoking, Speaker meeting."

In general, a record conveys the following information:

"The xxxxx group meets [DayOfWeek] at [TimeOfDay]; it's a [Type1[, Type2]...] meeting."

The user wants to say "I need to find an evening meeting for Tuesdays or Thursdays - I want it non-smoking"

No ranges anywhere. Just day of the week, time of day (morning or afternoon or evening), and optionally one or more attributes (although i don't know yet if multiple attributes should be AND'ed or OR'ed).

[Søren Dyhr]

Alright make it checkboxes in both layouts!!!

--sd

[Mandu]

Soren,

Your template is different in one respect: in Layout2, where you create a meeting record, 'audience' is single-valued, by virtue of using a checkbox interface. In fact, a meeting may have more than one "audience" - for example, it may be non-smoking AND have an ASL interpreter. I changed your format to "checkbox", and created a few records with multi-keyed audience fields, and then used 'test' layout to search, but it didn't appear to work. I'm not quite sure how your method works yet, but I'll keep at it.

I've decided to treat a query for "nonsmoking, ASL-interpreted" meetings as "nonsmoking OR ASL-interpreted" rather than "nonsmoking AND ASL-interpreted". This will yield more hits, and it will be up to the user to eyeball the hits and see if they'll do. I decided to do this (using OR rather than AND) because I don't want some drunk to come up empty because s/he doesn't understand Boolean logic :

BTW - I really like the "instant results" aspect of your template. I'd figured it would have to be a two-stage operation: input criteria, hit return, browse results. The first use I want to put this to is on a computer at a hotline phone center, and that would really help for quick, ad hoc, trial-and-error queries.

[Mandu]

ok, i tweaked your template some. it's attached. multi-key audience.

test.fp7.zip