Friday, October 28, 2011

Week 10: Muddy

I was a little confused after watching the lecture on databases and tables. There are two questions in this section:


1)How do you set a field to be a primary Key?


2) What is the most important characteristic of a primary key?


After watching the lecture a couple times, I determined that this was not discussed.


My first response was to open File Maker Pro and use the help menu; however, it cam up with nothing.
Then, I went to Google, where I found this answer:


"FileMaker doesn't have a checkbox/option like Access to define a specific field as a Primary Key. You can use any field as a primary key and many developers have a field naming convention to remind themselves which field they are using."
"The main thing you should really do with your field you want to use as a primary key is to turn on th validation option to ensure the values are unique and not allow the user to override that."
-this thread can be found here


If I have this correct, I think the reason there is no Primary Key is because you can alter what source you want to use as you primary on a flip of a switch. If this is the case that means File  Maker Pro makes it more easy to manipulate data in any way you would like. This seems like a great thing even if the program does have the flaw of not being able to save multiple sorted fields without scripting.


 I think this issue is not so muddy for me any longer. I suppose we'll see when I go to due the database project.

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