Subtitles of the Movie

We're going to spend a lot of time creating a fine script and you may ask why, because we already have a button up here that does find for us and if we go into layout mode and double click on it we can see it simply enters Find mode. And if we go back into Browse mode and try it out it does what it says and you can type in what you want, and then you can come over here to the status area and hit Find, and it finds the records you want. There're three records found. Works pretty good, but let's examine why this might not be a good idea. What issues could occur? So let's go manually into Find mode and the first thing you'll notice is you still have these buttons which were designed for Browse mode. In fact, if you click on New Customer, which you actually get if you show the status area, is a second request. Now you have two find requests. But they look a lot like records in Browse mode. So you've got to watch out. These buttons really don't go along with Find mode. They have nothing to do with it. They may be confusing. They may do the wrong thing and may cause some issues. In addition, if we continue to create requests, and I'll do it through the keyboard command here; it's the same as creating a new record, and you can see I'm adding up here. Soon as we go to eleventh request you get this error message that says, "You're in find mode and appear to be entering new record data rather than Find request criteria." So when I was working in Tech Support, we asked for this message because the most common call was, "I lost all my data"; and we found out 90 percent of the time, even greater than that, people were actually in Find mode entering their data and when they closed the file and opened it back up the data was gone. So people have trouble telling the difference between Find mode and Browse mode. Yes, as a developer you can see these things. You can see the word find here, you can see the omit check box, the symbols, you can see the little magnifying glass here, you can see the word Find here. If you go to the View menu you can see it's checked here. There's lots of indicators for you as a developer but I can tell you that people are just trying to get their job done, don't really notice these things, especially if you have the status area hidden. So, you don't want people to make mistakes inside of your database, so we want to make sure it's foolproof, and so what we really want is a script that takes them into Find mode and walks them through it, in fact, goes to a completely different layout for Find mode. And, continuing on with the status area, most finds are single requests, and maybe a couple of fields. They don't usually need omits, they don't usually need symbols; they don't need to use many of the features that are in Find mode, so what you want to do is tailor your find to the job they're trying to accomplish. Make it as easy as possible for them to accomplish it. Don't overload it with all these features. So usually we want to have this status area hidden so they don't even see this stuff. So, in general, you want to make your solution tailored toward what you need to do. Don't make it completely open so that there, everything in FileMaker is available. Make it very easy for people to use. Think about what their job is and focus in on that and make a script that does that. You might even have five or ten different find scripts. And there're also some other issues here. You've got to consider the fact that you have portals and related fields, and you may not want people to search those. What happens is they may get unexpected results, and rather than explain those things, they usually don't need to search those related fields, and there are times, but you really can confine that inside your script and make it easier for them to use it. Don't put a portal up there and make them wonder about what's going on. In addition, they may wonder well, why can't I get into the global field? Because global fields can't be accessed in Find mode, so there's some more confusion. So, really you should tailor your find script to the job. Make a special Find layout, and that's what we're going to find out how to do. Make your Find script focus on the task.