Finding New Find Techniques

It wasn't that long ago that you actually received paper manuals when you purchased new hardware or software. Nowadays everything is a mixture of HTML and PDFs that you can search through when required, but who reads manuals?

Most tech savvy people will happily place user guides to the side when faced with the job of using new software, hooking up a home theater system or assembling their next purchase of flat pack furniture.

Having used FileMaker for the best part of 10 years I feel I've got a strong grasp of my favourite database platform. Imagine my surprise when a recent trip into the Help documentation rewarded me with a new appreciation of the FileMaker find function.

More specifically, while I use the Find function every day I was unaware of the way in which some of the wildcards can be used, particularly when it comes to searching on date fields.

Try a few of these gems.

Search for date values matching a specific month

1

Returns all records within January of the current year (like searching on 1/1/2010..31/1/2010 but much quicker than typing the full date range and doesn't require you to know how many days are in the month you're searching on

1/2009

Returns all records within January of the specified year, in this case 2009

Search for dates values that fall on a particular day

Mon

Searches for all dates that occur on a Monday in the current year

Wed 3/2008

Searches for all dates that occur on a Wednesday within March of 2008

While all of these searches could have been carried out manually or by script these methods are quicker to enter, much more flexible and don't require any additional calculation fields to help provide the required smarts, i.e. an extra calc field that returns the DayName of the stored date.

Further investigation of the help documentation uncovered further gems when searching on time and timestamp values.

Looking for some extra tips? Read the manual :)