Probably not a big concern to most of us but hey, maybe you want to be really thorough.įinally we have the bullet proof comparison. So if you cloned your system and sent it to that British friend of yours, this comparison will most definitely fail. Anyway, with their format our calculation would be looking for the 4th day of the 22nd month of 2008. I bet they don’t even use feet and inches either. For instance England uses DD/MM/YY… wierd. Unfortunately for us, not everyone in the world uses the US date format. I have no idea all the date formats that are supported but I’m sure it can be looked up) (Disclaimer: Turkmenistanian format may not be supported. So if your annoying cube mate decided to set your computers locale info to Turkmenistan just before you created a FileMaker database, then congratulations Your dates are now stored in whatever date format they happen to use. We’re talking once that new database button was clicked or the first time you opened a saved clone. The locale information on a database is stored when the database is *VERY first* time the database is opened.

>Note: This is a little bit of an oversimplification. There is actually a more explicit way of this same comparison but it’s essentially doing the same things as above: Since you are probably in the US and the locale in your database is set to the US this will work just fine. Since FileMaker is pretty smart about evaluating strings, it will take the locale information stored in the database and parse our string into a date. We’ve told FileMaker to look at as a string this time. Let’s start with the faulty comparison first:ĭing, Ding, Ding we have a winner. For the purpose of this exercise, I’m going to assume that there is a valid date in a field cleverly named `MY_DATE` and the `MY_DATE` field is indeed defined as a date field. One’s bullet proof, one’s pretty decent and one just plain doesn’t work. There are three ways that people commonly use to compare dates.

Hopefully, I can point you in the right direction. It’s tough to tell exactly when FileMaker will treat the values that you are trying to compare as dates or as numbers or as…something else.

What does a filemaker pro app look like