That's not to say that I have any issues with them, but there are just other ways of achieving the functionality that they more or less offer. You'll find many more details on use cases for and opinions about repeating fields on the web.Īt this point with all of the new tools and features in the FileMaker Platform, I rarely use repeating fields anymore. Y ou can also sort your records by a repeating field, but the sort will use the value from the first repetition only and you can't re-sort the values within the field repetitions.
Your find would return all records where Thursday was entered into any repetition. These values are searchable as they would be in a typical database field however, you could not find all records where Thursday was entered into the third repetition only. For example, in a scheduling app, you could specify "Days" as a repeating field that could store values such as Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, etc., with each day name in a different repetition. Back when databases were flat – before they could be considered relational in any form – developers could use repeating fields to store different values within a single field, simulating a relational structure. What's a repeating field?Īccording to FileMaker's glossary, a repeating field is a field that contains multiple, separate values. If you've been using FileMaker for a long time or have taken over a legacy solution, chances are you've had to deal with them. You may even have an understanding of what they are but have never found a need to use them. If you started building FileMaker applications from scratch in more recent versions of the product you may not be very familiar with repeating fields and probably have never used them.
If you want to start a heated discussion with another FileMaker developer, start one about repeating fields! Some developers love them, some hate them and then there are some like me, who appreciate them as another tool in the belt to be used to accomplish functions that would be hard to do without them. Repeating fields have a long and somewhat controversial history in FileMaker.
0 kommentar(er)
