Comments on: Creating Random Numbers in FileMaker

By: Michiel

Michiel — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 23:46:59 +0000

Slight correction… Had an instance where the period (.) showed from the Random command (16.158J5), so I added a ‘0′ to the * 100000.

Left ( Random * 1000000 ; 3 ) & Left ( Random * 1000000 ; 3 ) & Middle ( “ABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZ” ; ( Round ( Random * 23 ; 0 ) + 1 ) ; 1 ) & Left ( Random * 100000 ; 1 )

By: Michiel

Michiel — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 23:34:35 +0000

Rather old post, but interesting… Check out this random sequence script, easily adaptable to any way or form. Super random creates numbers like this:

723883A1
619590H5
205985B6
635182T1
627171U9

I took out the letters “O” and “I” as these confuse with 0 and 1.

Here it is…

Left ( Random * 100000 ; 3 ) & Left ( Random * 100000 ; 3 ) & Middle ( “ABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZ” ; ( Round ( Random * 23 ; 0 ) + 1 ) ; 1 ) & Left ( Random * 100000 ; 1 )

By: Michiel

Michiel — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 22:42:55 +0000

How about…

Right ( Random ; 6 )

Gives a nice fixed 6 digit number.

By: miles

miles — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 07:54:42 +0000

Hmmm…

Let(
Num = Int ( Random * ( Maximum – Minimum + 1 ) ) + Minimum;
If( Num == Minimum ; Num ; RandomNumber( Minimum, Maximum ) )
)

Does not work. Its throwing an error….

what is MAX and MIN, those are fields ?

Miles.

By: Ritche M

Ritche M — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 03:42:14 +0000

Thanks for the function above. I’ll use it to generate random numbers.

By: John DeMillion

John DeMillion — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 07:15:33 +0000

FileMaker’s Random function did indeed originally include “1″ as a potential return value, but this was eventually recognized as the bug that it is, and in 10.0v3 they finally (!) corrected it.

See http://help.filemaker.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5464/

By: patricia Schiffman

patricia Schiffman — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 23:23:26 +0000

Found this for version 11 help

Returns a number between zero and one, including zero, but not including one.

By: patricia Schiffman

patricia Schiffman — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 23:18:54 +0000

I ran into the same question Johnathan had about Random and the same problem. Below is what I found addressed in FKB. To include 1 or 0 or not that appears to be the on going question. Is the test based on v3 or 10.0.

FileMaker Pro 10.0v3 addressed an issue where the “Random” calculation function could generate non-random values on certain machines. The “Random” calculation will now generate values greater than or equal to 0 and less than 1. The value will never be 1.

In versions prior to FileMaker Pro 10.0v3, the “Random” function returns “a random number between zero and one” including “zero and one”.

patricia

By: Geoff Coffey

Geoff Coffey — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 21:02:09 +0000

Garry: That is a slightly different problem because you want to remove the number from the available set once it has been used. One way to do it would be to set up a list of number from 1-179 like this:

Set Variable [ $i, 1 ]
Loop
   Set Variable [ $choices, $choices & $i & ¶ ]
   Set Variable [ $i, $i + 1 ]
   Exit Loop If [ $i > Get(FoundCount) ]
End Loop

Then randomly select one and remove it from the list:

Set Variable [ $rand, RandomNumber(1, ValueCount($choices)) ]
Set Variable [ $one, GetValue($choices, $rand) ]
Set Variable [ $choices, LeftValues($choices, $rand - 1) & MiddleValues($choices, $rand + 1, ValueCount($choices))

Do this in a loop and you should get them randomly assigned. This is all untested code. Geoff

By: Garry Bargsley

Garry Bargsley — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:00:55 +0000

How can you incorporate this for a found set of records. So I have a found set of 179 records and I want to randomly assign a value to each record, so basically 1 to 179 without duplication.

Can this custom function work with this or is that something out of the scope?