Birthday sorts

[mhollis]

My dentist does this, though I am not sure he's using Filemaker Pro to do it.

About two weeks before his patients' birthdays, his database guru generates a list of those who are celebrating and everyone gets a birthday card. I thought this would be an outstanding tool for my wife's business, as she's doing a very personal business that is reliant on word-of-mouth recommendation as much as her advertising. She has a 300 or so client databsse that is growing.

We had birthday cards printed up and we're generating a list. I've just done the second such and it's kind of a pain.

We have a field named "birthday." I do a search every two weeks and generate a printout for Avery 8160 labels. One of these years, I'll get up the gumption to print directly on envelopes.

To search the field, I have to go into Find and look in that field for (using April as an example) 4/{16 ... 30}/*

I leave off the year, as people are born in different years and I'm looking for month and date birthdates.

Is there a way to automate this? I find myself opening the Help file each time I do this and I'd like to make things easier and/or automate the search.

[jteich]

A three line script will solve the problem

enter find mode []

insert calculated result[ birthday_field ; see_below ]

perform find []

For see_below you insert something like

Let([

d = Day( Get(CurrentDate));

m = Month( Get(CurrentDate))

];

Case (

d > 16 and m < 12 ; m+1 & ".{1..15}.*" ;

d > 16 ; "1.{1..15}.*" ;

m & ".{16..31}.*"

))

I can't test it exactly for you because I do have another date format and yours gives errors in my environment.

-jens

[mhollis]

A three line script will solve the problem

enter find mode []

insert calculated result[ birthday_field ; see_below ]

perform find []

For see_below you insert something like

Let([

d = Day( Get(CurrentDate));

m = Month( Get(CurrentDate))

];

Case (

d > 16 and m < 12 ; m+1 & ".{1..15}.*" ;

d > 16 ; "1.{1..15}.*" ;

m & ".{16..31}.*"

))

I can't test it exactly for you because I do have another date format and yours gives errors in my environment.

-jens

when you did:

m & ".{16..31}.*"

Are you suggesting that the months are higher than 12? (It looks to me like you're looking for months 16 through 31).

I shall try this script though I have to say making scripts is not something I've ever done.