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A READER ASKS I was wondering if you could help me out on a FileMaker related question. I’m trying to relate a repeating field in table A to a list of value in table B. My question is that FileMaker seems to only take the first value in the repeating field into account and returns the related value of the first value in the repeating field. Let me know if you could help me out here, greatly appreciated. Thank you.
DWAYNE RESPONDS Anytime you want to merge repeating data with non repeating data, you want to use the EXTEND function.
Let’s say that you have a repeating field with numerical values in each repetition. You want to multiple each repetition by a number a see a result. Without using the extend function, you would only see the result of the first repetition. The extend function is used to calculate a repeating field by a non repeating field and see calculated result for each repetition.
EXAMPLE: A repeating field has these three values in each repetition ( 2, 3, 6 ). If we extend a field that has the number 2 in it and multiple it by the repeating field, we would get ( 4, 6, 12 ) as our repeating results. Without the extend field, only the first repetition would be multiplied by 2. So you would get ( 4, 3, 6 ).
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