Quick notes on Quick Find

One of my favorite new features of FileMaker Pro 11 is Quick Find, which allows you to perform a find the way we’ve been trained by search engines: you can search for your criteria anywhere in the record, regardless of which fields the data is in.  Here are a few things to keep in mind about Quick Find:

• Quick Find only searches the current table, the same way you search when using Find mode.  If you’re on the Company Detail layout, and search for Peter Parker, you might find a company record for The Daily Bugle, but you won’t find Peter’s contact record.
• Quick Find only searches the fields on the current layout, so that search for Peter will only find The Daily Bugle if the Company Detail layout has the related contacts::nameFirst and contacts::nameLast fields on it.
• Quick Find does not support any operators such as >, ≤, …, or =.  The exception is the double quotations marks, ”“, to match an exact phrase.  That way you can search for “Georgia Washington” without finding people living on Georgia Avenue, Washington DC.
• While Quick Find doesn’t search non-searchable fields (summary, container, or global fields), it will search merge fields in text objects, unless you omit those objects from Quick Find using the Inspector in Layout mode.  If you’re not aware of this, it can be quite a surprise what records you end up finding.

If Quick Find’s behavior isn’t exactly what you want want in your solutions, you can change it! Say you want Quick Find to always search using the fields on the Contact Detail layout, regardless of whether the user is on the detail or list layouts.  Create a custom menu set for your contact layouts and add the command Perform Quick Find (it doesn’t normally appear in any menu, but I’d probably add it to the Records menu). Then assign it an action to perform the script:

Go to Layout [ "Contact Detail" ]

Perform Quick Find [ Get ( QuickFindText ) ]

Go to Layout [ original layout ]

And if you need to keep the status toolbar closed but still want to allow Quick Find, use a global field with OnKeystrokeTrigger and the script:

If [Get ( TriggerKeystroke ) = 10 or Get ( TriggerKeystroke ) = 13 ]

   Perform Quick Find [ myTable::myGlobalField ]

End If

Lastly, remember that you can disable Quick Find on a layout by layout basis, using Layout Setup, as well as for each field and merge field using the Inspector.