Hunt, Gather And Present Search Results From Multiple FileMaker Tables

Thank you for your “quickly scripting filemaker…” video. I’d struggled to search my database with twenty tables (with hundreds of records in each one), and your approach worked perfectly.

You might have already solved my next problem: I want to search all at once (instead of one at a time), and present a report of the found records. Can you point me toward one of your videos?
Great work , thanks again,


In most cases, you can do anything with FileMaker and you can take many diverse paths to get there. I tend to lean towards the solution that provides the greatest value, least risk and reasonable effort. It is easier to add complexity to something overly straightforward than it is to simplify something overly complex. 

You can script a procedure such as the one in the video that goes to multiple table layouts to perform the search. Each search result would be in a separate window and you can even close the window if the found set returned is empty.  You can even do some elegant scripting to name the result windows and present them to the user. The user would need to go through each window to view the results but they may actually like it that way. 

The gather procedure would be the report you mentioned and that can actually independent of the hunt. All you need to do is figure out a way to present data from multiple tables in a single place. That will probably need to be highly customized based upon what you want to present in the report. 

PRESENT OPTION 1: You can take all the data gathered and copy it to a new search results table. This is a new representation of the data and can have many uses. 

PRESENT OPTION 2: A dashboard can be created for this as well and FileMaker dashboard design can become very time intensive. So I would suggest caution going down that path but it might be the best option for some consumers of the data results.

Hope that helps!