A question came up today in the Frontrange Support forums where a user was trying to filter a GoldMine report to show only contacts with a range of values in a field. He was stuck on how to format the expression in his GoldMine 5.5 installation to accommodate 28 different values and not exceed the 255 character expression limitation (in later versions, this expression limitation is increased to 1024 in some areas of the program and removed entirely in others.)

The question reminded me of a knowledgebase article we used to hand out routinely when I worked for GoldMine software Corporation’s Tech support department:

There is a limit of 255 characters for a filter expression. Often when doing a large OR comparison this limit can be reached. For example, you may want to filter based on a certain group of individual states by gathering up contact records whose state is CA, MA, NY, KY, OH, and so on.

A filter expression for this COULD look like the following, but the more states you add to the criteria, the closer the expression gets to exceeding the 255-character limit…

contact1->state=”CA”.or.contact1->state=”MA”.or.contact1->state=”NY”.or. contact1->state=”KY”.or.contact1->state=”OH”

A better way to do this in a shorter expression and without the added concern of exceeding the character limit would be to use the $ (the “contains” operator). For example, the above filter can be shortened to the following:

contact1->state $ “CA MA NY KY OH”

This essentially limits the filter to records whose state is contained within the list of states shown.