FileMaker Pro 9

Records Menu pt. 2 Video Training - Tutorial

Records Menu pt. 2 1

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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.

FileMaker Pro 9

John Mark Osborne

US$ 99.95

12.5 hours - 145 Movies

Win Vista XP 2000,ME. Mac OS X

Ground / 2 day / Next Day

33783

116 In Stock


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