🚀 go-pugleaf

squid@carroll1.cc.edu (Craig C Schanning) writes:

>I currently have a filemaker document that contains a bunch of peoples
>names and other data.  I have a First Name field and a Last Name
>field.  I want to have to computer automatically verify that the person
>is not already in the file.  There is no option for this when I make a full-
>name field that just concatenates the first and last name fields together.
>I don't really want to make the Full Name field the field where I
>enter the data, since it is hard to pick out the first and last names
>out of that field when some names have "Jr." or "Sr." at the end or
>when some names have middle initials and some do not.  Does any one
>know a work around, or do I have to just do a find before every new
>record I make?

    Well, your kind of up against a wall with this one. There is no
automaticway of having Fm Pro verify that a name is a duplicate,
especially since there are so many ways that a person can write their
name. Once this is understood, people usually go to some kind of unique
identifier field, that is almost always a number, like a serial number.
But this doesn't seem to be what you are looking for, so perhaps you
might want to try a variation of this workaround:
    Take the two name fields and concatenate the first name on to the
last name, ie: Last Name & " " & First Name. Then you can have the file
perform a lookup on this Full Name field within the database file, if it
returns with a match, then you have a duplicate name, otherwise you
don't. I don't know how effective this will be, but it will probably
work 80-90% of the time if you are really careful with your data entry.
Hope this helps...


--
-Brian V. Hughes
	     "If you could care less, then why don't you?"