Subtitles of the Movie

Let's talk about Housekeeping fields. Housekeeping fields allow you to keep track of what's happening to your records, such as when that record was created, when it was modified, who created it, and who modified it. And these are great to add to any database, so you can keep track of information, you may not even display them on the layout but sometimes it comes in handy because you can find out, oh, somebody's been messing up these records and now you can pinpoint who it is. So it's always a great way to find out information about your record, and you don't necessarily again have to show it on the layout, it may just be behind the scenes stuff that, you know, maybe you don't use for a year but when you're, all of a sudden you need to use it, it's there. So, you should add these fields to every single database. Now how do we get back in to define these fields? Well, we have to go to the File menu, to Manage, and then you'll see Database. Now, it's a good idea, since you'll be going in and out of Define Database, to memorize the keyboard command. So on the Macintosh, it's Shift, Command, D, or Shift, Apple, D. On Windows, it's Control, Shift, D. So, good idea to memorize that keyboard command, and that'll get you in there more quickly and if you find yourself working with another menu item quite a bit, we might want to memorize that keyboard command Ôcause they're right on the menus. So, we'll go ahead and choose that and you can see we're back into our Field section here, and what we're going to do is add in date, under Score Create, not creation date, date under Score Create Ôcause we'll have date under Score Mod. Very important to change that to the date, then create, and now we're going to go into Options, so whatever field is highlighted here you can go into the options for it. What you'll see in here is Auto Enter, Validation, Storage, and Furigana. Now, we're going to stick with just Auto Enter in just this top section for right now, but we will get into these other areas later on in later tutorials. So, what we're going to do for the Date Create is check this box, and we want to auto enter the date. We could auto enter the time, time stamp, the name, or account name. What this basically means is whenever you create a record, it's going to automatically put that date on it. Before we click OK, we want to make sure we check this box - Prohibit Modification of Value during data entry. This makes sure that somebody doesn't accidentally, or purposely change the actual creation date. So check that, so that it doesn't change unless the computer decides to change it. You don't want somebody, a user, to accidentally or purposely change that. So we'll click OK, and you'll notice those options show up here. And we'll come over here and modify the last name here, so it's Date Mod now, and we'll create that. It's a brand new field, we'll go into Options, and you'll see we have Modification Date. And you have the same options, we'll choose Date, and now what happens here is any time you change a field, any field on that record, this date will be updated. So any time somebody modifies that records, you'll know it. It doesn't keep a log, it just keeps the last modified date. And again, we'll check that as well. Click OK, and it shows up just like the other field. Now I'm actually going to click Cancel here. And watch what happens - FileMaker says, Hey, do you want to really get rid of any new information you've added in since you've opened this dialog? Now if you hit Cancel, it's the same as it was. You have to click OK to get out of this dialog, but if you click Cancel and then click Discard, all those changes are gone, now this is good and bad. You need to make sure you read this dialog, but it can also be good in that if you don't want the changes you made, you can just hit Discard and it will revert itself back to the way before. We're going to actually choose Discard here, and the reason we're going to do that is because we're going to show you a different way of getting these fields in there. We can actually go ahead and copy and paste them. So let's go to File, Manage, Database, notice that those fields are gone now, and you'll notice that if you have FileMaker Advanced, you can copy and paste. If you don't have FileMaker Advanced, well then these buttons won't be there so don't be confused. So this is one of the features of FileMaker Advanced that makes things easier. Now, if you have the regular FileMaker Pro, you can still do this, you just have to type these fields in. So we'll pay a little bit of attention to the fields we're going to copy and paste. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to the File menu and choose Open, and you'll see on my desktop, I have a file called Template. This is just an ordinary FileMaker file, it just happens to have some stuff in it that I like. So I'll open it, and you'll see that there's Time Stamp Create, Time Stamp Mod, Account Create, and Account Mod. Now, Time Stamp combines the date and the time separated by a space. So we use those instead of date and time so we can reduce the number of fields. And then we have Account Create and Account Mod. Now those two fields auto enter security information. Now even though we haven't created security information yet, there still is some in there, and we'll get into that later. But realize that if you assign accounts to everybody who logs on, then you can keep track of who created records and who modified them. So we're going to go into Manage Database, going to come over here and Shift click all of these fields, and then copy them. But realize, if you don't have the copy feature, that these are simple to create, just like the Date Create and the Date Mod. Just make sure they're time stamped and you have the right settings here, you can see them all there. Very easy to create. So we'll click OK here, get rid of the template, now we're back in Contacts, and we'll go to Manage Database, and now all we have to do is paste. So look how easy it is with FileMaker Advanced to take these fields and put them into this table. In fact, when you start getting multiple tables that are all related together, they're going to all have these fields. They're great to add to every table, not just the Contacts table, you want to have it in the Invoices table and the Products table and every table you have because you never know when you want to look at what happened to records in that table. So you can easily copy and paste it from table to table to table, rather than having to reenter it every time. Because what happens is that not only saves time, but it reduces the chance that you're going to make a mistake. I have done it quite a few times when I've accidentally say Auto Enter Account or something or date when it's really a time stamp. So make sure you set this up properly if you're typing it in, don't make a mistake, OK?