Generating find requests in script

[Roller]

I have a checkbox field that contains the names of all the people who sit on a board of directors. For each meeting date, I check off the ones who are present.

I'm trying to write a script that calculates how many meetings each board member has attended in a specified date range. I want the script to perform a find for every member in sequence: the number of found records will indicate the number of meetings they attended.

Is there any way to use a variable or field as the target of a find request in a script? For example, can I make the script look for "John Smith" if that character string is stored in a variable?

The only workaround I can think of is to enter find mode and then enter the variable into the field.

Also, is there any way to use a custom dialog to let a user enter a new value for a variable?

Thanks.

Edited April 6, 2007 by Guest

[Reed]

this sounds like a job for a report, or a portal to meetings from the members table...

How is your data structured? You probably want to set up a many-to-many with meetings->attendees<-members. This will greatly simplify your life as compared to just having a static value list of members.

[Roller]

I have one table that stores all the board members, with one record per member, and a separate table that stores meeting attendees, with one record per meeting. I wonder if I could create a report that shows a subtotal for each member in the attendees list, which should be the number of times they attended.

[Reed]

I'm thinking you'll want to also create a third table called attendance, that stores the meeting ID and member ID in a record so you'll have one record for each person at each meeting. This will make reporting much easier.

Take a look at the event management template I attached. In the relationship graph I changed the color of the TOs in question to blue.

Since you're on FM 7, this file won't work right for you as it contains tabs, but the relationship graph should give you the idea and I don't have a copy of FM7 around to use a template from that.

Event_Management.fp7.zip