With FileMaker 2025 or version 22, we now have a new way to interact with data. So let's set the stage. For the longest time when we needed to work with a set of records (whether it be locally or on the server). We would either perform a find to locate those records or maybe we would go to related records. There were a number of different techniques that we could use to navigate to the desired records. But in each case there would be drawbacks to locating those records. I'll outline a few of the ways we would achieve this before and compare and contract that with some of the new ways we will now be able to do this.
So let's say you are the teacher of a grade 6 class and you have 25 students in your class. There is a field trip that you are organizing to a local museum. Not all the students are going. So out of 25 students only 19 are going to the museum. So you are looking at a list of 25 students, and you decide to omit the ones that are not attending so you are left with the found set of 19 students. And the person who built the solution had found a way to gather up the ids of these records and send them to the server to send emails to each student for information about the field trip. This method involved gathering the primary keys of each of those records and putting them into a global text field and using a relationship from that global field to the primary key in the student table, you would be able to go to related records.
This has worked for the longest time, however it requires the use of a relationship. Another option might be to mark the records, and this was a common technique of the past. However marking the records also comes with a number of issues. If you are on a WAN, then editing all 19 records to mark them so that you can find them again. This will modify each of the records. This can be rather slow over a LAN, and if someone is editing one of those records then you would have to wait to make your changes.
Side note that FileMaker always has only one record that we are active on per layout. You can have a found set of records, but we are always sitting on one record at a time.
Now with this new script step called 'Go to List of Records' we now have the ability to