Invitation/Contact Database

[ryanm37]

Hello everyone,

 

I am pretty new to Filemaker, and I am trying to create a database for my job.

 

We do a lot of parties, and we need to invite a long list of people. What that's entailed thus far is a bunch of Excel spreadsheets. I want to make it easier by creating a Filemaker database based off of Outlook contacts, but categorize them. Importing the information from Outlook is easy, but I've run into problems when I want to categorize. I'll give you an example. 

 

If we have 500 contacts, and some are actors, some are managers, some are agents, some are on the west coast, some are on the east coast, etc....I want to say, "Let's invite all the actors and agents on the west coast" and have it spit out a list to me. Unfortunately, the issue I've run into is I've used the check boxes to essentially "tag" people, but it will only give me those who are categorized as agent AND actor AND west coast - not agent OR actor AND west coast...if that makes sense.

 

I'm probably doing a pretty terrible job at explaining this, but I'm happy to answer any questions. I think Filemaker will the the thing to help me do this, but I'm not sure how to go about it....

 

Thanks in advance. 

[KaosMaker]

Don't worry, you explained it just fine!

 

In Find mode, what you want to do is create two Requests (Control-N, or the menu Requests -> Add New Request):

 

1) Find Agents AND West Coast

 

2) Find Actors AND West Coast

 

Then Perform the Find. This can also be scripted (press New... in the Perform Find script step)

 

That should do it! New Requests in a Find are treated like OR statements, or essentially two different queries combined into one. Note that you can also choose to "omit" a find request, in case you, say, wanted to find all Agents on the West Coast that were NOT Actors.

 

 

Good luck, and welcome to Filemaker!

[ryanm37]

That is fantastic. Thank you so much! Super helpful. 

 

Another question - I have added all my "tags" (Agent, Actor, etc.) - but if I wanted to add another down the line, I've found this will reset all of my check boxes so I have to go through and do it again...any chance there's a workaround there? 

[KaosMaker]

I'm not sure why it would reset your check boxes. Your "tags" are in a value list, right? Say, a value list of "Agent, Actor, Janitor"? If you simply add a value to that value list, you should just have a longer list, like "Agent, Actor, Janitor, Elephant Repair Man". You might have to expand your checkbox field on the layout to accommodate the new value, but it shouldn't reset any of your actual data.

 

What you might be thinking of, however, is that if you *change* a value in your existing list, such as "Actress" to "Actor", it will indeed appear to reset your checkboxes. Technically, that value will still be in the field, you just won't see it.

 

As an example, let's say I have only two values, Agent and Actress. I decide to change the value list to Agent and Actor. If I have a record that previously had Agent and Actress checked off, the field itself (if you opened it as an edit box) would still contain Agent and Actress, but the checkboxes would have Agent checked, and Actor unchecked. If you instead merely added a third option, without changing the spelling of the previous two, the checked values in your records should not change.