Marking changes in text

[rsagall]

Is there anyway - perhaps with a plug in - to see when someone has changed text in a field in a shared database. I am looking for a way to do this in the same way that Word does.

I edit a newsletter and want to put the articles database on a server. Then the proofreader could make changes in the article and I would be able to easily see and approve or reject her changes.

Thanks,

Rich

[Fitch]

I'm not sure how Word does it, but if you search these forums for "audit trail" you'll find loads of ideas.

[rsagall]

All I could find were discussions about financial audit trails. That's not what I am looking for.

Word shows the changes made in a document. It gives the user the option of accepting or rejecting changes made by someone else.

Rich

[Brian C]

Please describe the behavior that MS Word has, and that way we can discuss how it might be replicated.

How does it identify changes exactly? does it highlight them? change their color?

How do you accept changes in word?

Filemaker has a function: Exact(originalText;comparisonText)

This function does a checksum comparison of two fields and returns True(1) or False (0) if the contents match or not.

If you are attempting to do a lot of freeform typing in a single field, a process to pick out what portions are different would be complex. I don't know if someone has create a plugin for doing something like this but it would be worth looking into.

If all you really need to know is if a field has changed, then exact() might be what you are looking for. Other than that, tagging the record with who modified it is an easy thing to do so you know who updated the record.

[LaRetta]

What you ask is almost impossible to achieve. You would need to write out strict rules of process; well, I won't go into the issues involved but rather point you to here . There have been several attempts (in FileMaker) over the years and all fail in one fashion or the other ...

LaRetta

[Fitch]

Originally you said you wanted to see when someone makes a change. That's what an audit trail does, keep track of who, what and when a field changes. Whether it's financial data or not is incidental.

You may want to have look at this resource list put together by the illustrious mr_vodka.

I'd also suggest theTroi Text Plugin: it can compare differences between two text fields.