Newbie Question

[butter]

I have two filemaker databases (main and products) with a related field. Is there a way to search the related field and return only what was searched for? When I do, lets say when I search "appliance" in the related database, it returns "appliance" but other products in that field as well.

[bcooney]

I'm assuming you have one FM database with at least two tables, main and products. How are main and products related? What is main?

Usually, you'd search the table directly. So, search products for type "appliance" in a layout based on a products table occurrence.

Please provide more detail of your setup: tables, actually fields, their relationships, and a real data example.

[LaRetta]

When I do, lets say when I search "appliance" in the related database, it returns "appliance" but other products in that field as well.

That is correct. It makes no difference what type of data your Products fields contains. If your Main record is related to Products records which contain:

Record1 - CD Player, Appliance

Record2 - Computer

Record3 - Appliance

Record4 - Computer, Appliance, TV

Record5 - Computer¶Appliance¶CD Player

... and you search for Appliance (in a Products field placed on your Main layout) then you will get the MAIN records which has Appliance anywhere in any of their related records. BUT ... if you want only records which have "appliance" and NOTHING ELSE in the field, you MUST search from your related (Products) table directly and then GTRR back to your Main table. Why?

To find Product records with ONLY "Appliance" in the field, you must type ==Appliance. If you search for that in your Main table, you will also get Record1, Record4 and Record5 (see above) which contains more than Appliance. Only searching ==Appliance from the Products table will isolate that product from everything else. I do not know the types of data/records that Products field includes but the example records above covers all possibilities (including repeating fields as the products records with Appliance in the second repeater). Meaning, if you search for ==Appliance and that exists in the second repeater, it will find it as well.

I hope I didn't confuse the issue even further. But searching related tables can easily throw someone off, particularly when FileMaker itself treats searches differently depending upon the starting point (main or related tables). If this is something you do quite regularly (and if you want records with exclusively 'Appliance') then you may wish to use another relationship to filter this instead. We don't have a vision of your process to help further; as Barbara suggests, more information would be quite helpful.

LaRetta :wink2:

Edited December 13, 2008 by Guest
Re-worded a bit

[LaRetta]

As an aside, butter, please name your subjects more directly to your question. "Newbie Question" won't help someone searching for help to their problem. Sometimes it isn't easy to provide an accurate, short subject (particularly if someone is new and doesn't understand their problem yet) but, for example, you could have called this one "Isolate related search results" or something.

You didn't do anything wrong but this is just a suggestion for future posting. :laugh2: