Richard
You are trying to avoid unwanted spaces in a name field. The examples
you gave were, I think, Mary Beth (OK) and John Q (NG).
My take on this is that either there is a rule (or set of rules) for
what is allowed, or there is not. If there are no hard-and-fast
rules, then you are stuck -- either you advise the user every time
there is a space (and allow the user to overrule the validation for
cases like Mary Beth) or you live with possible spaces in the field.
But if you can come up with a set of rules, they can (somehow) be
formulated as a calculation for validation.
In this specific case, it seems that double names are acceptable
(where names are of at least two letters each) while initial-type
forms (only one letter) are not. It is probably possible to come up
with a calculation, maybe a custom function, that will trigger
validation for the latter. And there is no reason for the validation
calculation to consider only one criterion; you can use the 'or'
function to string together any number of conditions. If any one is
met, the validation fails. My only problem with this is that you can
only provide a single, generic validation failure message -- whereas
if you have included multiple possible failures (field is empty;
field contains a 'word' of only one character) you really need to
specify exactly what the problem is.
Of course, the alternative is to provide an edit screen from which
users exit by clicking a 'commit' or 'save' button -- running a
script that handles the validation.
Steve
On 24 Sep 2008, at 16:01, Richard S. Russell wrote:
I was hoping to avoid that and find what I need right within
FileMaker, since I do volunteer DB development for about 20
different non-profit organizations and I don't want to have to
install "extras" on all those sites just to perform a simple data-
entry validity check (well, 2 checks, maybe not so simple). But,
with the auto-enter trick you showed me above, now I probably won't
have to. Thanks again!
