I have an archivist that I am thinking of building a database for. The one thing that keeps us from doing it in Filemaker is that fact that once you enter data is automatically saved unless changed. She has users (not very careful users) making changes to an archive database where she is paranoid that precious data will be changed and can not be retrieved. Therefore, she wants all records to stay the same until the user does something positive (like click a save button).

Is there any way that people have found to provide this "commit" function in FM?

Thanks,

Marshall Spriggs

The usual method is to present global fields to the user for data entry. Once the user is satisfied with the data, an "Enter" button is pressed. This runs a script which actually creates a new record, copies the values from the global fields to the corresponding fields in the new record, and clears the global fields. If you really wanted to get carried away, you could create a separate file to store the prechange values of changed records (or hire more careful data entry personnel ).

-bd

[This message has been edited by LiveOak (edited February 09, 2001).]