hello again after a long absence trying to hone my Filemaker skills now that my company has F8 - but I guess I'm still a newbie so excuse if I ask a question that has been answered before (although I've just spent a half hour skimming through topics hoping to find a 'simple' answer that might help my problem - but no luck )

so can I ask if anyone knows how to help with the following:

I have a database with 2 fields I need to bring up in a report - I need to run the report every quarter which looks for the date1 field completed but date2 field blank -I think I can work this bit out myself as follows

If(GetAsNumber(date1) ≠ "" ; If(GetAsNumber(date2)="" ; "alert message "))

but where I get stuck is how do I get the report to run so that each time it only searches on records with date1 completed in the previous quarter??

many thanks for any tips you can give me

Carol

Carol:

It sounds to me like you could do a find (or add a request to your find) with the wildcards for 'empty' and 'not empty', which are = and *, respectively.

Otherwise, you should look into using the IsEmpty() function (which you can precede with 'not' to show what has data in it.)

-Stanley

Firs you will have to figure out what the last quarter date would be. So if the date is today 8/3/2007.

Then the serach criteria would have to be > = 3/1/2006 and < 7/1/2007 for the start date and = for the end date being empty.

Not nessersarily the the way I would do it, take a look above - It's what i would initiate my reporting script.

In line 3 is it where I gather dates from previous quater by using this calc'

GetAsText(

Year ( Get ( CurrentDate ) ) - 

Case ( not Div ( Month ( Get ( CurrentDate ) ) ; 4 );1;0 )

& "+" &

Choose ( Div ( Month ( Get ( CurrentDate ) ) ; 4 ) ;

"{10...12}"; "{1...3}"; "{4...6}" ; "{7...9}" ) 

& "+*")

The way it works is if you are in jan, feb or mar should the search both subtract the year by 1 and choose the month span of {10...12} ....

Otherwise make a search in the previous span. Actually should:

Div ( Month ( Get ( CurrentDate )

...be declared as a variable instead of being repeated, which gives a faster code ...although the difference is very tiny here!

--sd

How about:

Let ( [

today = Get(CurrentDate) ;

q = 3 * Div ( Month ( today ) - 1 ; 3 ) 

] ;

Date ( q - 2  ; 1 ; Year ( today ) ) &  ".."  & Date ( q + 1  ; 0 ; Year ( today ) ) 

)

many many thanks to you all - I'm busily working through these but it's getting a bit complex for me - it may take a bit of time...........