Forum Discussion
QuickBaseCoachD
6 years agoQrew Captain
I'm not really understanding the ask here. Do you need to be able to change the search term you are looking for?
Or are you looking for the results to display as an embedded report on a parent record and you want children who match some word in a field on the parent record.
Or are you looking for the results to display as an embedded report on a parent record and you want children who match some word in a field on the parent record.
- RyanAnderson26 years agoQrew CadetSpecifically, I have a form with several fields on it for a table. One of those fields has a unique alphanumeric code we type in that should only be used "once" in a record. Now the records already have the record id that is being used on all the parent-child table relationships.
We were going to just check the box called "Must be unique" for this alphanumeric field and call it a day, but the issue is that we also need to allow this field to be blank too. Not just for 1 record, but to allow many records to have this field be blank and pass.
We couldn't figure out a way to do that ... have a field contain only unique value if it is entered in, yet allow blank values if they are not. The only way we seemed to be going towards is a lookup against that field, but it makes the whole form sluggish and useless.
We're trying to do this in a form because we want it so when a user decides to type in a value into this field, the form will block the save if that value already exists in another record as being used. If the user decides not to attach a value to this field and leaves it blank, then it will save. - QuickBaseCoachD6 years agoQrew CaptainWhen you set la field is being unique, in fact blank values are allowed in a field marked as unique. In fact the only duplicates that are allowed in a field marked unique is if the field is blank.
So why don�t you just mark unique and Call it a day.
Except that what you would do would be to make a summary report and group the records by this unique field and sort them up on the number of records so that the duplicates float to the top. Then do a one time manual scrub of your data to get rid of the duplicates and you will be clean going forward. - RyanAnderson26 years agoQrew CadetWe'll look into that again today. We had a programmer check the unique field earlier and likely based off your comment, we should double-check that unique feature
- RyanAnderson26 years agoQrew CadetOkay, that works. thank you. Apparently, when this was tested a while ago, it was stated that the checkbox for marking as unique did not work as expected for blank values.
- QuickBaseCoachD6 years agoQrew CaptainOK, great, There may have been confusion between a Key field needing to be Unique and a unique field being unique. A Key field to a table may not be blank.