Hide Caption
Show Caption
OK, so let's go down to the next step, which is Delete Found Records. This is
referring to this found set right here. Now, it may say Delete All Records if
you have all records showing. Either way, when you choose it, it comes up with
"Do you want to delete, permanently, all 41 records in the current found set?"
It's the same thing as Delete Record, but on a much wider scale. So this could be
a much bigger deal, it could cause a lot more problems for you if you
accidentally hit the wrong menu item, and then Delete All. Make sure you read
these dialogs because you could permanently delete everything in your database,
and there's absolutely no way to get it back. So I'm going to very carefully
click Cancel here. And this is one of the reason why when you create a solution
that you want to go ahead and change the menus and dim them out so that people
don't have access to Delete Found Records, because if your users aren't familiar
with FileMaker, they may go "Well what's this, let me try it." Then all of a
sudden, and believe me, I used to work in technical support for Claris, I know
people do this all the time, they call up on a weekly basis; I deleted all my
records. So be real careful with that step there. Now, Go To Record is the same
options as what you have over here with the Rolodex and also with your record
choice here, that's the specify and it'll come up with a dialog, so those are
pretty easy. You also have refresh window, you probably never use that, but it's
available. It'll just refresh the window so that it just essentially redraws
everything. You probably won't need it. Show All Records, Show Omitted Only,
Omit Record, Omit Multiple, Modify Last Find, Sort Records and Unsort, they all
work found sets, changing them, and organizing them. And we're going to go over
those later. The last three choices: Replace Field Contents, Relookup Field
Contents, and Revert Record are all dimmed. So you might wonder, well why are
they dimmed? Well, they require you to do something before you go up to the
menu, and so if we go into a field, you will now see that Replace Field Contents
and Relookup Field Contents are available. Now, Relookup is not going to be
covered right now because it involves lookups, and we haven't covered them at all.
But we can briefly cover Replace Field Contents, and what we're going to do to
cover that is add a new field, and if you remember, I turned off that option for
adding newly defined fields to the layout. And I did that because I didn't want
to ruin our layout, but I also don't want to get into Layout mode yet, which is
how I would add a newly defined field to the layout. So, we're going to go back
into Preferences, and if you're in Windows it's under the Edit menu. And we're
going to go ahead and go to the Layout tab. And then we're going to check that
box back on. And I'll probably come in and turn it off later, but now if we go
back to Manage Database, we can add a field called Category, and that'll be a
text field. And you might also notice that I broke our naming convention here
and really wasn't thinking about it, and it's easy to do. I made DOB all capital
letters. Really, that should be all lower case, so I'm going to change that,
just so we're following our naming convention of all lower case all the way
through. So now we have a category, which is a text field, we'll click OK, it
automatically adds it. And now, it's important when you use a Replace Field
Contents just like Delete All Records or Delete Found Records, that you look at
the found set because it doesn't work on all the records, just the found set of
records. So we're looking at 41 records right now. So what we want to do is put
a category on every single record. So we're going to go in here and type in
Commercial. Now we're eventually going to have other choices in here, we'll have
a pop up menu and things like that, but for right now we want to put that value
on every single record in the found set. So once we type it in, and while our
cursor is still inside that field, we'll go to Replace Field Contents. And
there are three choices here, we're going to go over the second two choices
later, but we'll go over this very easy to explain choice. But before we do
that, read this at the top. "Permanently Replace," FileMaker uses that a lot.
This is, you can't undo this, this is going to permanently modify that field. Now,
there's not too much worry here because there's nothing in the field right now,
but really, make sure you read this. Permanently Replace the Contents of the
Field category, so make sure it's the field you thought you clicked in, because
I make mistakes all the time and this happens to me, I accidentally replace the
wrong field. And that's where I've learned to make lots of backups. In the 41
records of the current found set, and then since we have the Radio button next
to Replace With Commerical, it's going to put the word Commercial on every
single one of those records. So once we're sure that this is what we want to do,
we hit Replace, and now if you walk through these records, you'll see that each
one of them has the word Commercial on it. Now, what happens to new records?
Well if we create a new record, it's not going to have the word Commercial on it.
Choose New Record, there's nothing on it. So what we want is for that to
automatically be entered in. So what we're going to go ahead and do is go into
Manage Database, we're going to go to our Category field, go into Options, and
we're going to do a Data Auto-entry, so we're going to type in Commercial
exactly how you want it to be auto-entered. Now, this means that that's your
most common choice because eventually we're going to put our pop up menu on
this field. But we want it to automatically be specified as commercial right off
the bat, so we're going to go ahead and click OK, click OK again, and now when
we create a new record, you'll see the word commercial automatically goes in
there. So we'll delete these two records, don't really need them because they
don't have anything on them, just clean things up, and now you know all about
what the Records menu do. There's a few things we haven't covered, but again,
we'll go over these later, this section right here.