Database Reference
In-Depth Information
hold the length of each song on a CD. This calculation tells you how long the entire CD
is:
Sum ( Songs::Song Lengths )
▪ To double, triple, halve, or otherwise scale a time duration, multiply or divide it by a
number.
If chilling your microbrew always takes twice as long as cooking, then you can determ-
ine the chilling time with this calculation:
Cooking Time * 2
Parsing Dates and Times
Just as you can parse bits of text from text fields, FileMaker lets you pull out parts of a date
or time value. For example, you can keep track of all your employees' birthdays in a normal
date field, but when you're trying to get statistical data from the year they were born, you're
not concerned about the month or date part of that value. You have six functions at your dis-
posal to pick those individual components from a date, time, or timestamp value. They are
Y
ear(), Month(), Day(), Hours(), Minutes(), and Seconds()
.
With a date value, you can use
Year(), Month()
, and
Day()
. If you have a time,
Hours(),
Minutes()
, and
Seconds()
apply. You can use all six functions with a timestamp value.
These functions all have the same form. Each takes a single parameter—a date or a
time—and returns a numerical result. For example, the day function returns the day portion
of a date. This calculation returns
27
:
Day ( "7/27/2013")
TIP
Just because FileMaker thinks of dates as numbers, you're not limited to using them that way. See
the box below to see how to use parts of a date as text.
