FileMaker Pro 12: Beginner Tutorials
Working with the Database / Records Menu pt. 1
Subtitles of the Movie (FileMaker Pro 12: Beginner / Working with the Database / Records Menu pt. 1)
Let's examine in more detail what you can do in Browse Mode with the Records Menu. So first thing you want to do is make sure you are in Browse Mode, you can look down here at the bottom and see it says Browse. You can go to the View Menu and see where the checkmark is, you can look at the Status Toolbar. You want to make sure you identify what mode you are in by looking at the you know, the things that you are used to seeing in that mode because you don't want to accidentally do something in that mode like the most common mistake is Find to Browse Mode. So once you get to the Records Menu, you'll see New Record if you're in Browse Mode. And of course we covered New Record but I'll mention one more thing, I'd recommend memorizing this Keyboard Command, either Control N on Windows or Command N on the Macintosh. That's because it's easier to go from the Keyboard Command which is on the keyboard to typing into that new record rather than going from the mouse and choosing the item and then starting to type. Staying on the same input device rather than switching between two is much faster and if you're doing a lot of data entry that will really help you out as far as speed. And right below it we have Duplicate Record, Duplicate Record is pretty cool. Notice we have 43 records right now, if I choose Duplicate Record I'm going to get exact duplicate of Glens record. The only thing that's going to be different is it's Timestamp Create and things like that. We can then go into that record and say oh well this is Glens wife, there we go, we've just made a, a duplicate of this record, changed one thing and we have a completely new record. Because they probably have the same home phone number and same home address. The same is true for let's say two different contacts at the same company. You might change the name and the phone number and the e-mail address and the date of birth, but all the rest of the stuff, such as the address will stay the same, you can save yourself a ton of time. Now there's other ways to also make duplicate records, it's a little bit different. We're going to try creating a new record and then come down to the First Name Field and Insert from Last Visited Record. You notice it's pulling in from the last record that we visited. So the benefit here is that you can duplicate some of the record but not necessarily all of it. So you have to determine is Duplicate Record better or Insert from Last Record better. Now there's also a Keyboard Command here as well, all you have to do is do Control Quote or Command Quote and then you click down to the next field and do the same thing and if you throw in the Shift Key you can walk through the records and copy whatever you want. So there's lots of little things to help you out and make things faster, in fact there's even a Script Step for the item that you have there. Now it's important to understand what the Last Visited Record is. Let's go to a different record here and I'm going to click into Menu Waters and then click out. So I've, I've clicked into it to activate that record, clicked out, then I'm going to look at Bill Swanson and now I'm going to Create a New Record and now I'm going to do that Keyboard Command to copy. Notice it's copying the one that I last visited not the one that I last looked at. So I'm going to go through this and copy this, it's going to be good to have duplicate records in here for when we do our section on that so we can actually have records that duplicate. So I'll get all this stuff in there so we can actually find these. So that's the Duplicate Record Feature, right below it is Delete Record, again a very scary feature, this is one reason why when I develop solutions for people who don't necessarily program in FileMaker, I'll put security in some, them so they can't accidentally delete a record. Or you know automatically before a delete, say make a copy of it somewhere else so, you know and then sometime of supervisor or admin can delete it later. There's plug-ins that do that as well. So it's a very scary thing because you can't get this back unless you go to a backup and a lot of people don't read these messages and it's important to make sure that you know, you keep all that data in there. You don't want to lose it, people aren't necessarily malicious, they just don't know how to use it and they don't know it permanently delete this means or maybe they don't read the message and who knows what. And that's another reason why Cancel is the Default here. Now even scarier is right below it, Delete All Records, that will delete all the records in the current Found Set so if we happen to have, we'll use this feature down here, Omit Record, if we happen to have 45 records in our Found Set right now and we choose Delete Found Records, notice it says Permanently Delete all 45 Records in the current Found Set. Not 46 just 45, this is even scarier because that will take all these 45 records and permanently delete them, they'll be gone and there's no way to get them back except to go to a backup. So I normally don't even leave this available to any user at all, it's really I think personally a Developer Feature. And if we go into the Records Menu we have Go To Record, Next, Previous and Go To. That's similar to this feature right here, Next Previous and the Go To Feature where you type this in. Then you have Refresh Window and this is an interesting feature. It essentially refreshes the window or redraws the window so that it you know it's up to date. Now you don't typically need to use this very often because FileMaker does a pretty good job but there are certain situations where FileMaker says well this is going to be an efficiency issue, I'm not going to go ahead and update the screen. It might be that you have Relationships that are three levels deep and it's not going to update it when you change the record at the lowest level, not on the current screen. So you've got to, you got to think about what FileMaker tries to do to make things happen efficiently but I, I would say 99.9 percent of the time, you won't need this feature and so don't worry about it, it's there. But if you do see something, you're like I'm sure this Relationship should have updated, try it and it'll update it. Or if you, you know some things drawn strangely on the screen or a calculation hasn't updated, you could use it but I can tell you, I rarely use it myself. Sometimes I throw it into scripts but we haven't covered scripts and we won't cover Relationships in fact until the intermediate section. Now we're going to skip Show All Records, Show Omitted Only, we've covered them a little bit, Omit Record, Omit Multiple, Modify Last Find, Save Finds, Sort Records, Unsort. because we're going to cover those in separate chapters. We're going to cover Replace and Relookup and Revert Record in the next section. So just realize this section right here won't be covered until later because it deserves really a, a lot of, a lot of time and these really deserve some specific time also. But we'll cover them next, these you'll have to wait a little while for when we cover them in the Find Section.
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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