Newbie question re count function

[Paul49]

I have a field that has 5 possible text values.

How do I perform a count to see the total number of times each value appears in the db?

[bcooney]

Create a calc flag field for each possibility:

TextA_flag = if (patterncount ( myField; "TextA",1,0)

then use a summary field to total each flag field.

[Paul49]

Thanks for the reply

What u are saying is that for each value I want to count, I will have to create two new fileds?

[bcooney]

Yes. Are you looking from one table to a child table for the counts? If so, you could use relationships to see all counts at once.

[Paul49]

It's all in one table.

The main table contains bio data of people...names, dob, address, race, employment, etc.

I would like to be able to count the number of each race among other counts.

[bcooney]

This topic may help, it uses relationships to calculate the counts. This is much better than summary fields, since you can see these counts without running a report. See this post

I also need to say that matching on data and not on an ID is not a good idea. For example, if you change the value list from "TextValue" to "TextValue2," it will not update pre-existing values and so your counts will not be 100% accurate. However, if the user was really entering ID=2 then you could change the TextValue that shows for ID=2 and the value stored is still ID=2 and your counts will be 100% accurate.

I guess that's just a long-winded way of saying, "match on ids and not on text..or live to regret it!"

Edited March 18, 2007 by Guest
added speech about id matches, lol