Hi David,
 
Make sure that you have 'Show Button' set to 'True' for the date field and then it's a matter of educating, monitoring, and scolding. In a designer form, users can type into the date field without opening the assistant, but with Show Button = True they will have the ability to open the assistant that they're used to and enter the search dates.
 
Jeri
 


-----Original Message-----
From: The Museum System (TMS) Users [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Aylsworth, David
Sent: Thursday, August 14, 2008 11:49 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Search dates in forrm designer



Have any of you who have been designing your own forms had problems with putting the "Date" field onto the form?  I'm concerned that it doesn't seem possible to add the "Begin Date" and "End Date", so if people update the date field, they do so without updating the dates that I have been telling people to use for searching.

Or am I missing an obvious way to search by date of object?  We've got a fair number of objects in the collection that the official date is "not dated", but users still want them to come up if they are doing a search for works from a particular time period.  Putting "circa" dates into the main date field seems to block them from coming up in a search by date range, as do phrases like "nineteenth century", etc.  That's why I really LOVE the "begin date" and "end date" fields...

Our previous database did not have them, and our conversion to TMS seemed erratic with what records got begin and end dates updated.  We've been making an effort to get them in there now, and have gotten some success with getting people to search by them when they want a reliable list of objects in a given range.  I'm concerned that if I let them enter a date without the automatic updating of begin and end date, that we'll have unreliable data again.  I almost don't want that field available on the form if it doesn't allow for entering begin and end dates.

Have any of you wrestled with this problem already?  I have a feeling that I'm overlooking something very obvious again...

Thanks as always!

David

David Aylsworth

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Registrar for Collections

telephone:  713-639-7824

fax:  713-639-7780