mark cards by finding -- a problem

[Timothy Miller]

Hi, my name is Tim. I am a hair-ripper. I haven't ripped for, uh, 
three minutes.

I'm stuck on this one. It's probably an obvious mistake but I've 
checked, triple checked, etc.

find patientName in field "patient name" works fine. It finds the one 
record I expect it to find

if I comment out that line and replace it with --

mark cards by finding patientName in bg field "patient name"

-- no cards get marked.

Oops. I just made it work. Feel free to jump to end of message.

The in between part of the message might be a dull cautionary tale for newbies.

It's possible this is a bug. If it's already well-known, or fixed in 
2.6, well, I feel stupid. I suppose there's an easy way to look up 
well-known bugs in various versions. Anybody want to tell me how?

I got as far as http://support.runrev.com/bugzilla/#searching and 
then "1. Click the "query existing bug reports and enhancement 
requests" link." Where the heck is the link?



FWIW, here's the middle part:  *****************************

I've checked the syntax. It looks okay. variable patientName contains 
what it is supposed to contain. It has to, or the plain "find" 
command wouldn't have worked.

I've copied and pasted the variable name and the field name from the 
line that works to the line that doesn't work, just to make sure 
there were no misspellings or anything. No help.

I tried adding

go to card 1 of bg "record", so the script wouldn't try examining 
field "patient name" on card where it didn't exist. No help.

On a lark, I tried

mark cards where patientName = value(bg field "patient name")

On another lark, I tried mark cards by finding value(patientName) in 
bg field "patient name"

On a third lark I tried

mark cards by finding "Jones, Bob" in bg field "patient name"

None of the larks helped.

I went back and tried

find patientName in field "patient name" again.

It works fine, just like before.


************************ End of middle part

Here's how I got it to work:

mark cards by finding string patientName in bg field "patient name"

  -- does work!

This seems like a good example of the woeful state of the documentation.

The documentation doesn't say that I can write "by finding string 
patientName". It doesn't say that it's a good idea to write the "mark 
cards by finding" command that way.

I looked at the documentation again. It seems like "find normal" 
would have worked anyway. In fact, "find normal" does work for these 
fields and variables. Further investigation shows that "find string" 
and "find whole" also work.

variable patientname and bg field "patient name" are exact matches in 
this case.

Hmmm... I tried --

mark cards by finding whole patientName in bg field "patient name"

-- This doesn't work. It should, as far as I can tell.

I dunno, maybe it's a bug. But every time I think I've found a bug, 
it turns out I'm doing something wrong.

Comments welcome


Thank you for your kind concern.


Tim