I'm trying to create an invoice/statement. I need a field named "Date" in
the Header
and in the body another field named "Date" to list the dates work was
done over the month.
Is there any way around the unique field other than renaming a field?

Terry

I don't understand the question, but what I know is that one should
avoid naming their fields with 'Function' names of FileMaker. Date, Day,
Year are among them, see the help at 'functions'.
Remi-Noel


"Terry Cano" <tcmusic (AT) pacbell (DOT) net> a écrit dans le message de news:
OCalf.23572$BZ5.14390 (AT) newssvr13 (DOT) news.prodigy.com...

Terry,

FileMaker would not be able to distinguish between the "invoice date" and
the "work date" if they were both named "Date" (and neither would most human
beings after a while). So the fields need to be named differently no matter
what.

Some common conventions would be:

Date_Invoice
Date_Work

invoiceDate
workDate

dInvoice
dWork

Any of those formats would work, the better if you were consistent with them
across all the fields in your system.

FileMaker's Help file has the following to say about naming fields:
=================================================
Field names must be unique, and can contain up to 100 characters. Follow
these guidelines when naming fields:

* Do not use any of the following symbols and words in the field name:
,(comma), +, -, *, /, ^, &, =, ¹, >, <, ( ), [ ], { }, ", ; (semicolon), :
(colon), :: (relational indicator), $ (variable indicator)

* AND, OR, NOT, XOR, TRUE, FALSE, or the name of any FileMaker Pro function

* Don't begin a field name to be used in a calculation formula with a space,
period (.), or number.

* Use _ (underscore) in place of a space to avoid restrictions in ODBC,
exporting, web publishing, and other operations.

* If you're exchanging data with another application, check the field naming
restrictions in the file formats supported by that application.

* If you're using ODBC or JDBC to share FileMaker Pro data, avoid using SQL
keywords in field names.
=================================================

In truth, FileMaker does not prevent you from creating fields named "Invoice
Date" or "Work Date" (they contain both a function name and a space) but it
is possible those can confuse you when working with formulas later on, or
even confuse FileMaker in some situations.

Now, FileMaker does a very convenient thing (unless you turn off this
option): When you create fields, it automatically adds them to the
appropriate layout, with a text label next to them. So you add "DateInvoice"
to your table, and you see:

DateInvoice [__DateInvoice__]

This is a text label and the DateInvoice field.

Users see the text label and a rectangle. The rectangle is either empty (in
the case of a new record, for example) or has a date in it. Unless they go
into layout mode, they'll never know that "rectangle" has the name
"DateInvoice."

As for the text label, there is nothing magic about it... you can go ahead
and change that to read "Date" or "Invoice Date" or "Yogi Bear" or anything
you like. You can even remove it altogether. It is independent of the field,
so it doesn't doesn't affect the field contents, or the name of the field,
or anything else. Your layout can thus show:

Date [__DateInvoice__]
Date [___DateWork___]

So, go ahead and name your fields uniquely, then go to your layout and
change the names of their labels to whatever you like.

Bill

[p.s.: Actually, there is one tiny magic thing about field labels.... when
you change the name of a field, text blocks in the vicinity of that field
which contain the old name of the field (and *only* the old name of the
field) are changed to reflect the new name, too.]

"Remi-Noel Menegaux" <rnmenegaux (AT) free (DOT) fr> wrote