Order upon opening

[Donnie Mayes]

We have our database that is accessed everyday for data entry. The database opens the data entry form and the user starts to scan the information.

My problem lies in the fact that when the database opens, it opens in the order of the oldest entry first. The first field of the form however automatically puts in the system date, which changes the first record to that date. Like today, I opened the database to do some work on it, and it changed the date on the first record, which had a date of 08/24/2000 to 04/22/2002. It was easily changed, but now I have to go back and check all of these records from August of 2000.

Is there a way to change the table to open up with a new record or open the form with a blank entry to solve this problem? Any other suggestions would be great! Thanks for the consideration!

[JohnZaleski]

RE: Order upon opening

I don't know what you are doing to force a date into that field, but if you put the following:
date_entered.value = date()
into the "onenter" event of your form, it should only force today's date into the field when you are adding a new record. Or you could put date() into the default value for that field in a field rule.

[Tom Cone Jr]

RE: Order upon opening

Donnie,

As John suggests you need to figure out why the current date is being substituted for the actual field value in the first record shown each time the database opens. This behavior will not happen by itself. Somewhere along the way the designer of your system embedded instructions to Alpha Five to do this. There are two likely places where this might have been done:

1) in the form itself. The OnInit or OnActivate events may have scripts which do this;

or

2) In field rules for the table.

-- tom

[Donnie Mayes]

RE: Order upon opening

John and Tom;

Thanks for the replies. I checked the field rules on the table, and the form itself. Nothing is in there anywhere. Is there a way to when the table is opened, it can open a specified field in descending order?

I changed the field rule on the "current date" field to be date(), and I checked the form and pressed the "New Record" button, which it then placed the current date in there. We'll try that for now, but any thoughts on the opening order situation?

[Tom Cone Jr]

RE: Order upon opening

Sure,

In many cases it's possible to set the desired order in the properties of the form itself. Have you tried that?

-- tom

[Thomas Henkel]

RE: Order upon opening

is the field a calculated field of date()??

If so, when the form opens in either enter or change mode, the calculation will fire. It would be better to do as suggested above. Explicitly say when to plug the date into te field.

Tom

[Tom Scholis]

RE: Order upon opening

If your not happy with the fact that you open to the oldest
entry first you might check out fetch_last(). If you
want to keep people from accidentally starting data
entry over existing data you could send when the
form starts and thus force the user to press at least once
before they start a new entry.

[Tom Scholis]

RE: Order upon opening

The F3 Key got lost on the last message.