Filter by Item and What gives with my field?

[Robert Brenstein]

On 26.07.09 at 16:23 -0700 Tom Cole apparently wrote:
>Dear Group,
>
>I have two items that I hope someone can help on. One is very 
>straightforward: I need to filter a field by the items.
>That is, I have a field with zillions of records with four items 
>(comma delimited)
>
>itemone,itemtwo,itemthree,itemfour
>
>...
>
>Second, I have a field that is full of TAB delimited records like this:
>
>Southern Arizona Trip TAB 5/27/1973 TAB This was the trip when we 
>got two flat tires in the middle of nowhere.
>
>...


If you have zillions of records, then you should possibly consider 
using a real database engine to store the data. Then fetching 3 
columns in specific order or any sort of filtering and data selection 
becomes trivial.

You don't say how many records you have in the second case, but here 
database could also make things simpler, particularly the searching. 
In this case, displaying one record at a time with each item in its 
own field could be most optimal. For list view, you could have a 
truncated version of the long text with ellipsis (...) at the end.

Robert