FileMaker Pro 12: Beginner Tutorials
Creating a Database / Housekeeping Fields pt. 1
Subtitles of the Movie (FileMaker Pro 12: Beginner / Creating a Database / Housekeeping Fields pt. 1)
Housekeeping Fields allow you to keep track of what's happening to your records such as when the record was created, when it was last modified, who created that record and who last modified that record. These are very important fields to have in every one of your tables. You may not display them on the layout for users to see, but you may need them at any time. For instance, maybe you have a new employee who's entering data incorrectly but you don't know it's that new employee. Well, if you look at who last modified that record, you can probably identify who made the mistake on that record. Maybe they put a Return into the field and you can go up to that employee, hey you know, don't hit that Return Key, hit the Tab Key instead. So there's a lot of other things you can help, people maybe putting it incorrect, you know, a disgruntled employee or something like that, there's all kinds of things that these Housekeeping Fields can help you track down. They're really, really, really helpful, even if you don't display them on the layout. So let's go ahead and create some of them, we're going to come over here and enter Date Created. It's going to be a Date Field, so make sure it says Date there, hit Create. And then you notice how it's highlighted up here. Whatever field's highlighted over here, you can then go into Options. So we'll click Options and then here is a bunch of options. We have Auto-Enter, Validation, Storage, Furigana. We're going to start off with this Auto-Enter and talk about what this does and we're going to use it specifically for this particular example which is Auto-Entering the Creation Date. That means that if you check this when a new record is created, it will immediately put the date from the current computer, you know, whatever the clock is set to, whatever the date is set to, it'll take that date from the current computer and put it into that field. So the date obviously has to be set correctly on that computer but it usually is, I mean, there's no reason it wouldn't be especially since computers set their dates through, through the Internet now and they're always up to date. So that automatically puts that in, that's what an Auto-Enter means, it Auto-Enters that data for you. So that's a great thing to have that data entered in there so you know when that record was created. And then we're going to come down here to Prohibit Modification of Value during Data Entry. This is a safety mechanism to make sure that you know that data is correct, you know, nobody's gone in and accidentally modified and changed that date. Maybe they wanted to change it because they didn't want to know the last, I mean, who knows what they might have done, but this will make sure it can't be modified so that date that was created is the date that was entered there when it was created. Now there's a lot of other options in here that we'll get to as we go through the tutorials, don't worry about not knowing all of them. The first one you need to know is this Creation Date and realize there's other options here that you can Auto-Enter, like Time, Timestamp, Name and Account Name but we're going to go over those in upcoming tutorials. For right now, Creation Date is perfect and it automatically chose Date just so you know, because we had Date here. It knew that you wanted this one to Auto-Enter so it just made things easier for you. You'll find FileMaker doing that a lot for you. So we're going to click OK and check over what we did. We make sure it's a Date Field. We can see its Auto-Enter in the Creation Date and it can't Modify. So that, it's important to become familiar with these options here so you really know what's going on and I'm going to just going take this to make my job easier. I'm going to delete these letters, type in Mod for Modify and then hit Create again. Go into Options again, this time I'm going to choose Modification Date, it has all the options are dimmed out because this is a Date Field. But that's the idea here it, it knows that you know, it must be this one, because you have a Date Field and then we're going to choose Prohibit Modification as well. Now how does Modification Date work? It works whenever you modify any field, there's only one Modification Date for the whole record and it's when you modify any field on that record. And it only updates when you commit that record, that would be going to another record or, or clicking somewhere where you're not in a field, you know, there's no cursor in the field or maybe close the file. Those are all committing the record and that's when that Modification Date will update. So click OK again and there are your Housekeeping Fields at least very basic Housekeeping Fields. We do have some additional ones we want to do for accounts and we're also going to change this to a Timestamp from a date but I wanted to give you the very basics, the easiest ones to do here. So what we're going to do in the next section is go ahead and copy and paste those Housekeeping Fields from a template so you learn about a FileMaker Advanced Feature. Now if you don't FileMaker Advanced you're going to have to type these in and we'll show you all the details but you should have FileMaker Advanced to make your life easier, allow you to copy and paste these. It'll help you in two ways, one is you won't have to do all that typing because let's say you have 10 tables. You have to do it every single one and when you're going through these tables you're bound to make a mistake by typing them in. So you might as well copy and paste them, make your life easier and cut down on mistakes.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | FileMaker Pro 12: Beginner |
| Author: | John Mark Osborne |
| SKU: | 34323 |
| ISBN: | 978-1-61866-046-6 |
| Release Date: | 2012-06-08 |
| Duration: | 16 hrs / 169 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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