Hello, I am in need of some help and I don't known where I should post this. I checked out the FileMaker website with no luck. I am hoping someone will be able to help me.

I used FileMaker Pro 4.1 to create an inventory of all the chemicals at my work and it works great except when I do searches.

Most of the chemical names are very long (since they contain hypens). It seems FileMaker will not search past the 20th letter of a word. This is a big problem since the main part of the chemical name often occurs at the end of the name.

For example if I want to find

5-Bromo-2'-Deoxyuridine and use the term

*uridine or *deoxyuridine, FileMaker will not find it. However, if I do not go past the 20th letter such as *deoxyurid* it will find the term. Or if I put a space infront of deoxyuridine then it will work.

The only thing I can figure is that the Find function only looks at the first 20 letters of each word. Do you know any way around this? Is there a script I can write, or a newer version of FileMaker that will allow me to search the entire name?

Your input is greatly appreciated,

Daisy

quote:

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Originally posted by Daisy:

Hello, I am in need of some help and I don't known where I should post this. I checked out the FileMaker website with no luck. I am hoping someone will be able to help me.

I used FileMaker Pro 4.1 to create an inventory of all the chemicals at my work and it works great except when I do searches.

Most of the chemical names are very long (since they contain hypens). It seems FileMaker will not search past the 20th letter of a word. This is a big problem since the main part of the chemical name often occurs at the end of the name.

For example if I want to find

5-Bromo-2'-Deoxyuridine and use the term

*uridine or *deoxyuridine, FileMaker will not find it. However, if I do not go past the 20th letter such as *deoxyurid* it will find the term. Or if I put a space infront of deoxyuridine then it will work.

The only thing I can figure is that the Find function only looks at the first 20 letters of each word. Do you know any way around this? Is there a script I can write, or a newer version of FileMaker that will allow me to search the entire name?

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Break the search field up into multiple words and/or multiple lines of text.

FMP will not index past the 20 character in a single word, or more than 60 characters per line.

FMP finds work fine on fields with multiple words and lines.

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Kurt Knippel

Consultant

Database Resources

mailto:[email protected]

http://www.database-resources.com

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Perhaps a quick work-around (that won't require too much change to the database) could be to create a calculation that takes out the hyphens and replaces them with spaces. You'd use the calculation...

Substitute[chemicalname, "-", " "]

..where chemicalname is the field that you are currently searching on.

Perform your seaches on this new calculation field because it will work around the "20 character per word" indexing limit because there is now more than one word in the field.