Managing an Active list of Members and an Archive list of Members

We often bump into the problem of wanting to spring clean our data. We have a list of members, for example, and over time, some people leave. We want to know which are the active members and which are not. We always want to keep a full history of our members, even if they are no longer active. But we don't want them cluttering our list of active members.

The simplest option is to add a number field, call it "isActive." For active members, set it to one. For inactive members, set it to zero or empty. You can now search for this field to locate the active members. This option works really well and there is almost no down side. Unless you get the found set mixed up and send annual membership invoices to all your inactive members - or something similar.

In some situations, switching between active and archived members isn't suitable. In that case you want to look at the solution provided here. It uses an extremely simple method that can easily be retrofitted to existing systems.

ActiveVolunteers.fmp12.zip (90.9 KB)

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I usually have a "status" field that contains choices of "Active, Inactive, Paused" etc.

Then the "isActive" field that checks the status field for "Active"

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