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This simple example shows how to find birthdays by month. I’ve seen folks try to construct a date for the current month using concatenation but unless you use the Date function, the result won’t work in other countries with different date formats. I’ve also seen folks try to update a search field with the current year for the DOB using the Replace Field Contents feature but that takes a long time and causes record locking.
A very common search task is to locate dates in the future. Though these searches may be easy for you as a developer, it's a very good idea to script the solution for your users. Start by interviewing your users and find out how they need to locate future dates. This example demonstrates future dates by days, weeks and years, but it will give you a good start on developing your own unique solution.
Many people ask me how to make it easier for users to create simple date range finds. If you don’t think it is hard for a basic FileMaker user to remember how to enter an ellipse (...) between two dates, then you have never provided technical support. Itís your job to make life easier for your users, so spend the time to learn this technique. This technique was previously published for FileMaker 6, but Iíve updated it for FileMaker 7 and later with a few changes specific to the new version.
Some of the new date search features in FileMaker Pro 8 are just what I've always wanted. For example, you can type in a range of "Monday...Friday" or "Mon...Fri" to locate all weekday dates. Or, you can use wildcards to locates all dates on January 1st, regardless of the year, by typing "1/1/*". You can use curly brackets to specify a range of months, such as "{1...6}/*/* to locate all the birthdays in the first 6 months of the year. Try these same wildcard techniques with time fields too. Play around with these tools, and I'm sure you'll be impressed with the flexibility. And let me know if you figure out some combination of these new features that let's you accomplish some really cool technique.
Indexes makes finds and other features fast. Think of looking for a word in a book by flipping through each page. It’s much quicker to go to the index where it will tell you each page where the word is contained. This is exactly how an index works, it only stores each word once per field across all records. There are two types of indexing: Minimal and All. Minimal means only one index type has been created while All means two index types have been created. The most commonly used index type is a Word index and can only be created for text fields. Up to 100 characters of each word are indexed. Words are defined most often by spaces but can also be determined by commas, periods, colons and other characters. A word index does not differentiate between uppercase and lowercase. Searching for “FRED” also finds “fred”. A Value index is used for searching number, time and date fields as well as relationship key field matching. Up to 100 characters of each return-separated value are indexed. While searching can be done on partial text in a Word index, only complete values can be searched for in a Value index. When you think about it, why would you want to search for a partial number or date. Indexes are utilized in a variety of features other than finds such as value lists based on the contents of a field and unique validation. Understanding how an index works can help you better design a database.
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