Losing Find Requests

[Maxwell Morlay]

Is it likely that FM will lose a Find Request or unexpectedly use another Find Request in a script? I have had this happen several times.

I have about 10 clients using our databases from a server. All of them are read/print-only. We are an arts organization with many donors. I create a script that finds "Best 300," i.e. patrons who have given at least $xx. It finds approximately 300 names -- perfect. A month later I run the script and it's finding 900 names. No, not an increase in donors. It's now Finding with different search criteria.

It's easy enough to re-do the find request, but it troubles me for security reasons. Any experience with this? Thanks. Maxwell Morlay

[ October 17, 2001: Message edited by: Maxwell Morlay ]

[Kurt Knippel]

99 out of 100 times this is a fault of the designer or a mistake of the user.

I have NEVER know Filemaker to spontaneously switch find criteria.

What are you telling Filemaker to do? What do your scripts look like?

[FUBAR]

Find requests seem to be changed accidentally a lot especially when dealing with scripts.

When editing your scripts that contain a 'find' command, after you are done editing you are given the option to 'keep' or 'replace' the find settings (which depending on what you pick can alter the search criteria.)

Also with multiple finds you have to be careful that the users can't be finding more results than they wanted. For example, if you were searching for donors who gave $x in January but then someone wants to find donors that gave $x in January and December, then you have to make sure that the 2 find requests look like...

-----------------

Month: January

Donation: x

-----------------

Month: December

Donation: x

----------------

rather than....

-----------------

Month January

Donation: x

----------------

Month: December

Donation:

----------------

I hope something out of this ramble is useful.

[Vaughan]

The surest way is to generate the find request each time.

Enter Find mode [] (don't restore requests)

Set Field [amount, ">=300"]

Perform Find [] (don't restore requests)

With this script, the saves find requests are never used so they dont matter. Even better, create a global field to store the find amount to make it easier to change later.

Alternatively to find the XXX biggest donors independent of amount donated without using any sort of Find:

Show All records

Sort [amount, descending]

Omit Multiple [XXX]

Show Omitted

[Maxwell Morlay]

Thanks. Maxwell Morlay