Editor’s note: for additional thoughts on this subject see Fast Summaries Revisited and Fast Summaries Re-revisited.
Have you ever wished you could pull the values from a summary report, and use them in a script or a calculation? Back in the FileMaker 6 days, Mikhail Edoshin introduced a technique to do just that.
He called the technique Fast Summaries, and I came to employ it extensively in my own solutions. Continue reading “Fast Summaries”
25 Feb 2012: Custom function syntax corrected to fix a minor bug.
There are various FileMaker functions that we can use to extract one or more characters from a text string (or any data string for that matter), provided we supply the proper numeric coordinates. For example,
Middle ( "Literature" ; 4 ; 3 ) = "era"
or
GetValue ( "Winter¶Spring¶Summer¶Fall" ; 3 ) = "Summer"
The key is knowing the numeric address of the data we wish to extract. In some cases we know it in advance (e.g., the first item of a return-delimited list); in other cases we calculate it on the fly. Continue reading “ValuePosition: The Function FileMaker Forgot”
Not long after FileMaker 7 was released, I happened to mention to one of my colleagues (Ilyse Kazar, in case you were wondering), “Now that auto-enter calcs have gotten so much more powerful, there’s really never a reason to use a lookup ever again, is there?”
“Actually,” she replied, “there is one thing that you can do with a lookup that you can’t do with an auto-enter calc…” and proceeded to tell me what it was. I promptly built a primitive prototype of today’s demo file, to see for myself, and she was indeed correct.
At first blush, it appears that every feature of the venerable FileMaker lookup option for fields can be replicated via auto-enter calculation — until you attempt to populate repeating fields that is.
If you ever need to set or clear a whole bunch of reps at once, you will appreciate how easy a lookup can make this operation. Continue reading “Lookups and Repeaters”
