The Field object represents a single FileMaker field. It *does not hold the data* in the field. Instead, it serves as a source of metadata about the field. For example, if you’re script is trying to be highly dynamic about its field access, it may need to determine the data type of a field at run time. Here’s how:

  field_name = "Some Field Name"
  case myRecord.fields[field_name].result
  when "text"
    # it is a text field, so handle appropriately
  when "number"
    # it is a number field, so handle appropriately
  end

Attributes

The Field object has the following attributes useful attributes:

• name is the name of the field
• result is the data type of the field; possible values include:
  • text
  • number
  • date
  • time
  • timestamp
  • container
• type any of these:
  • normal (a normal data field)
  • calculation
  • summary
• max_repeats is the number of repetitions (1 for a normal field, more for a repeating field)
• global is true is this is a global field, false otherwise

Note: Field types match FileMaker’s own values, but the terminology differs. The result attribute tells you the data type of the field, regardless of whether it is a calculation, summary, or normal field. So a calculation field whose result type is timestamp would have these attributes:

• result: timestamp
• type: calculation
• *control& is a FieldControl object representing the sytle and value list information associated with this field on the layout.

Note: Since a field can sometimes appear on a layout more than once, control may be an Array. If you don’t know ahead of time, you’ll need to deal with this. One easy way is:

  controls = [myField.control].flatten
  controls.each {|control|
    # do something with the control here
  }

The code above makes sure the control is always an array. Typically, though, you’ll know up front if the control is an array or not, and you can code accordingly.