Troubleshooting

Data Gets Truncated with Certain Export Formats

After I export data from my database, I noticed that some fields exported only part of the information that they contain. How can I export all the data?

If you have fields that you use to store lengthy notes or comments, you may find that those notes get truncated when being exported to certain file formats.

Several of FileMaker's export formats have limitations on the amount of data that can be exported. The BASIC export file format truncates data from any single text field beyond 255 characters. The DBF supports only 254 characters, and only 4000 bytes per record. The WK1 format exports only 240 characters per field. If you need to export extensive notes data on a regular basis, these limitations can be problematic . One possible solution is to move your notes into a separate table. You can enter notes into separate rows of a portal, and any especially long notes can be broken up among multiple notes records. They'll all still relate to the same parent record, and it actually gives you some additional flexibility in managing those notes. You can attach separate dates and times to each note, for example, and sort or search on that criteria.

An Alternative to Updating with a Record Lock

How can I make sure that other users can't change information that I'm editing when I'm using an ODBC client application?

FileMaker does not support the SELECT FOR UPDATE syntax, so it's not possible to lock a record with a SQL query.

Because you can't lock a record prior to updating it with ODBC, it's necessary to come up with an alternate plan to avoid overwriting another user 's changes. One option is to query the record contents into a set of temporary fields before editing the record. With some effort, you can construct a calculation that constructs the UPDATE statement so that it updates only the fields that you changed. The result is that you and another user can have your record changes merge together.