Find/Select

[David Thompson]

I think Jay Schille's method was much better than 
the one you are quoting, but to answer your 
question, an execute command compiles and runs a 
procedure that is created on the fly. Let's say 
that info("fieldname") returned the word

Address

because the Address field was the active field at 
the time. That would put that word into the 
fieldname variable. In that case the formula

"Select «"+fieldname+"»=clipboard()"

would produce this text

Select «Address»=clipboard()

The execute command would then treat that text as 
a one line procedure. It would compile it, and 
run it. The formula was using the + operator as a 
concatenation operator. Three strings of text 
were being concatenated to produce one string of 
text. The first string was "Select «". The second 
was the contents of the fieldname variable, which 
in this example would be the word "Address" and 
the third was "»=clipboard". When all three are 
put together, you get the same result as you 
would have if you had written "Select 
«Address»=clipboard()" as your formula. The 
advantage being that you didn't need to know in 
advance that the Address field would be the 
active field.

Jay Schille's method takes advantage of the fact 
that a pair of empty chevrons can be used to 
stand for the contents of the active field. It 
also uses a local variable, rather than the 
clipboard to hold the value you want to use for 
comparison. It's much nicer if the user doesn't 
have to worry about the contents of the clipboard 
being invisibly changed by some procedure. Even 
if you will be the only user, it's nice not to 
have to worry about that.

Dave


>Would you mind explaining the expression «+fieldname+».
>It's the + signs surroundng the variable name I'm curious about?
>
>________________________________________________________________
>
>On Apr 27, 2008, at 4:14 PM, Jeremy Tice wrote:
>
>>>
>>You're trying to select records where the 
>>contents of the variable equals the clipboard, 
>>not what the contents of the field whose name 
>>matches the contents of the variable.  I'd do 
>>what you're trying to do with an execute 
>>command, like so:
>>
>>global fieldname
>>fieldname=info("fieldname")
>>copy
>>execute "Select «"+fieldname+"»=clipboard()"
>>
>>or, to save a few steps:
>>
>>copy
>>execute "Select «"+info("fieldname")+"»=clipboard()"