searching by email address

[skuli]

Hey All,

I am trying to set us a search form that will allow a user to search a database by their email address (the idea is to allow them to remove themselves from a list). The problem is that the "@" symbol seems to get encoded and therefore FMPro returns a "no records found" error. Does anyone know how to solve this? Thanks.

[agraham999]

Um...there may be an easier way of doing this...but if I understand what you want to do...you could create a masking field that filters out the @ and allows them to search just the text...again off the top of my head.

The user searches for their email address...and alhtough they see the @ and can enter it when searching...you can calculate that part out in the masking field. To them there is no difference.

Does this make sense?

[evildan]

I think the answer is to do a search looking at the email as a text string....

"[email protected]" will work but remove the quotes and you won't get it to work...

is this a form submission?

Is there a way you could try to add quotes at the begining and end to the search on the field.. so the user enters [email protected] but the search is actually for "[email protected]"?

I'd try that apporach... if I had a database setup with email addresses I'd test a few forms for ya... but I don't sorry.

[nonzerocomm]

Hello Skuli,

I'm pretty sure that the @ symbol is treated as a wildcard by FMP when you search for an email address in your database via the web, very much the same way as directly in FMP. In Filemaker Help Viewer, I searched wildcard and got to the "Finding text and characters" topic.

==========

A) Gr@y finds Gray and Grey

: @on finds Don and Ron but not Bron

.....

*C) "@" finds @ (or an email address, for example)

Copyright © 1994 - 2001 FileMaker, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

==========

If Microsoft Bill wants to find his email in your database, he'd have to type billg"@"microsoft.com

== Other alternatives ==

Try to split username and domain in two seperate fields.

For website URLs: I treat method (ftp, http, https), domain (www.websitename.tld) and locator (/~find/sitemap.html) in three fields.

Now, email username are often case-sensitive and email aliases ([email protected]) carry characters that can conflict with wildcards.

Domains are not case sensitive and only 0...9 and a...z (plus the hyphen - ) are allowed. Webmasters even suggest to avoid the hyphen when choosing a domain name.

To match a complete email could require to use the AND operator. If you planned to use the OR operator whith a field and the twin email field, then a workaround is to be coded.

agraham999 and evildan were right about it being a text search problem.

Hope it helps.

[skuli]

Thanks to all for all of the ideas. Unfortunately, I am still having problems with this. I too, thought about making a calculation that would strip out the "@" symbol because it is indeed a wildcard character. I can't get that to work, since email addresses come in all sorts of flavors ([email protected], or [email protected]). Any ideas on this one. in the mean time I have split the email address into two different fields so that the user has to enter the first part of their email address in the first field and the second half in the second field. Not a very elegant solution. Any other solutions are greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[Anatoli]

You can maybe also search in calculated field where you Substitute the @ for XX1XXX. I guess there is not name or domain with XX1XXX.