Month: July 2017

JSON, Level: Intermediate

JSON + Virtual List, part 2

Kevin Frank

31 July 2017: As per my exchange with Beverly Voth in the comments section, the date encoding technique used here is strictly intended for situations where FileMaker will both produce AND consume the JSON.

Demo file: json-plus-virtual-list-part-2.zip

This is a short follow-up to part 1, to demonstrate an alternative idea re: JSON date encoding. As you may recall, JSON does not have a “date” type, and one of our goals is to encode and decode JSON dates in a region-agnostic manner (e.g., encode in a region where MM/DD/YYYY is the default, but then decode in a region where DD/MM/YYYY is the default).

To accomplish this goal, in part 1, we wrapped our FileMaker dates inside a GetAsNumber function when pushing them to JSON so they looked like this:

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Continue reading “JSON + Virtual List, part 2” →

JSON, Level: Intermediate, Version: FM 16 or later

JSON + Virtual List

Kevin Frank

31 July 2017: As per my exchange with Beverly Voth in the comments section of part 2, the date encoding technique used here is strictly intended for situations where FileMaker will both produce AND consume the JSON.

29 July 2017: demo has been updated to require a minimum version of FileMaker 16.02 as per my exchange with John Renfrew in the comments section.

One nice thing about FileMaker being on a yearly release cycle is that there is always something new to learn and write about… and, having recently attended a pair of highly informative sessions on the topic of JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) at Devcon 2017 — thank you Todd Geist and Anders Monsen — it is clear to me that JSON + virtual list is a compelling combination.

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Demo file: json-plus-virtual-list.zip

My original plan was to integrate JSON with virtual list reporting, but in the interest of clarity, I decided to save that for a future article. Today we have a straightforward demo that a) generates a small amount of JSON from a standard FileMaker table, and then b) renders it in a virtual list table. Continue reading “JSON + Virtual List” →

Level: Advanced, Version: FM 13 or later, Virtual List

Virtual List Reporting, part 3

Kevin Frank

Update 30 September 2021: while this article is worth reading for background information, I now recommend using the approach utilized here: Virtual List Reporting, part 4

Last year I posted a couple articles on the topic of virtual list reporting (part 1 and part 2), a.k.a. VLR. Today we’re going to look at some additional things you can do with VLR, and to avoid a lot of repetition, this article will assume the reader is familiar with the material covered in part 1, wherein benefits are extolled and fundamentals explained.

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Demo file: VLR-part-3.zip  (3.4 Mb compressed)

Did you notice in parts 1 and 2 that we were limited to producing a single report at a time? Yes, we could sequentially output them and concatenate them into a PDF, but we couldn’t display multiple reports on-screen simultaneously, nor could we interact with them in browse mode.

This time around we’re going to look at a method to produce multiple independent reports concurrently, each in its own window, based on a single virtual list table. This will entail generating a large number of dynamically instantiated $$vars[withReps], so we will also explore a way to automatically clear them out (without the overhead of having to keep track of them during instantiation).

Disclaimer/Warning: before running multiple Customer reports, open your Data Viewer and activate the Watch tab. You don’t want to display the Current tab with 5K or more variables in memory, unless you’ve got a lot of… time… on… your… hands.

Continue reading “Virtual List Reporting, part 3” →