>Hi all,
>
>Have a process for a law firm where if someone goes into a Plaintiff file, they need to have an alert fire. Here are the details:
>
>- Plaintiff record holds basic "tombstone" information
>- child table that holds links to each of the lawyers/law firms involved and casualty companies / adjusters involved
>- each of these child entities have a memo field that contains "special instructions" (plain text) with stuff like "Bert always wants all documents to go to his assistant Ernie"
>- the usual case is for about half a dozen child linkages
>
>They want to know when any of the "special instructions" have changed for anyone connected to the file.
>
>I accomplished this in the past by:
>- I added a date field to track when the "special instructions" have change on each company and/or lawyer/adjuster
>- every plaintiff file has a date stamp on it for the last time these instructions were viewed/printed
>- every time the Plaintiff record is opened all the instructions are looked up and compared with the "last viewed date" and if any are newer, the user is prompted to view/print
>
>e.g. if the last time a clerk went into a file was June 14, 2017 and one of the lawyers had their instructions updated on July 1, 2018 and a clerk went in today, since one of the lawyers has a newer date they are prompted to view and reprint. They are also prompted if a new lawyer or law firm is added to the list of child contacts.
>
>This has worked for the 99% of the time. Users have sometimes complained that they are prompted to reprint the instructions and then when they compare them to the old ones, nothing seems to have changed. I figure this happens for the following reason:
>
>- a new lawyer or adjuster is added to the contacts list but they are *from the same company* and the instructions are at the company level (not the individual person level) and so the actual text is no different than before - but my process cannot detect this
>
>There is also the possibility that because I do not capture datetime (just date), that someone could print something in the morning, someone else could change the instructions in the afternoon and this would not detect the change. When I first programmed this about 15 years ago, they said that that happening would be very, very remote. I am not so sure this is always the case.
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>So the question: I am thinking of instead doing this based upon the checksum value for the text and storing that alongside the text. I would then look up all the checksums and add them together to get a "total checksum" value for the connect contacts. e.g. if I had 3 linked lawyers and the checksums for each of their text was 1111 and 2222 and 3333, the total checksum would be 6666. I would store this in the plaintiff file. In that way, if a different lawyer is assigned to this file but from the same company, the checksums would be the same.
>
>So what is my question: the checksum values returned seem to be very large (using CRC32). I realize that there is the possibility when adding them together that the total could be the same for one collection of contacts (i.e. from their instructions) to another set. But I think it would be very, very remote if not just about impossible.
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>Comments? or is there another way to approach this problem?
>
>Albert

Have you thought of using GETFLDSTATE() to detect that something has changed in any of the fields in the table:?