[10 June 2018: includes updated material from my recent dotFMP presentation.]
[30 May 2018: check out my reassessment of the Fast Summary technique here.]
Here are files that were demoed or referred to during my “Virtual List on Steroids” DIG-FM presentation on Thursday, May 10th, 2018 (VLR = “virtual list reporting). Continue reading
I’ve been working on a couple large JSON projects over the last few months, and with the one year anniversary of FileMaker having built-in JSON capabilities just around the corner, this seems an opportune moment to share some reflections and opinions (some of which may contradict JSON-related opinions I have expressed previously).
Demo file: json-sandbox.zip
The following is intended to be a series of observations, rather than a structured introduction to JSON in FileMaker. If you’re looking for the latter, I recommend these resources in particular.
At any rate, if you’re not yet completely comfortable with JSON perhaps some of the following will be helpful, or failing that, amusing (intentionally or otherwise). Continue reading
Does this sound familiar? You’ve rolled out a solution that includes a single-record Settings table where authorized users can enter/update various system-wide settings, including one or more fields where the items will appear in popup menus… and then comes the inevitable question: Why don’t items in popup menus appear in the order I entered them?
The “problem”: field-based value lists sort alphanumerically
It’s a reasonable question, and in the past you might have replied, “Because field-based value lists rely on a field’s index, and their sort order is alphanumeric”… but after reading today’s article your new answer will be: “No problem — let me take care of that for you.”
From demo #4: field-based value lists mirroring the order of their underlying source fields
(Interestingly, the above is accomplished with the same value list attached to all three popup menus, and no script triggers… or scripting of any kind for that matter. Read on to learn how.)
Editor’s note: today we have a guest article written by John Weinshel, who has been quietly contributing to the FileMaker community for 20+ years. John’s thoughtful postings have helped developers at all levels of expertise, and I’m pleased to present his thoughts on Tableau here on FileMaker Hacks.
Demo files: exposed-by-tableau.zip (6Mb, contains two .twbx files)
Tableau trial: https://www.tableau.com/products/trial
The Tableau connector widget for the FMS 16 data API has made developers aware of the incredible interactive charts and graphs in Tableau. What may be less obvious is that Tableau can also tease out data that is hard to see natively—independently of the cool graphs.
FileMaker data is about a thing, an entity—the customer, stock, auto part, invoice item, reservation. With some additional work, we can see patterns in groups of data, but the default is to deal with it at the row level.
Visualization tools like Tableau, on the other hand, start out with groups of data. With some additional work, Tableau can elicit information about individual records, but the default is to work at the aggregate level. One of its strengths is, in fact, revealing patterns about groups of groups.
This post looks at how Tableau can—apart from its dazzling graphics—reveal hidden information within FileMaker data. It does not get into how to build calcs and views, nor how to connect Tableau to FileMaker data; some suggestions for learning about Tableau appear at the end of this article. Continue reading
Recently, in a virtual list report, I had a need to sort on rep number 2 of a repeating field called cell_text_r.
FileMaker does not offer an obvious way to script a sort on a field rep > 1, and I had worked around the problem in the past by…
A. Defining some special non-repeating fields in my virtual list table like so
[Note 1: as always a huge thank you to Bruce Robertson, for inventing virtual list, and for many other contributions to the FM community over the years.]
[Note 2: the following assumes the reader is familiar with basic concepts presented in Virtual List Reporting, part 1.]
This is a follow up article to document new material from my recent FM-DiSC presentation: Virtual List on Steroids. The presentation was intended for developers who are (at least) somewhat familiar with virtual list, but for those not actively using virtual list, I decided to begin with a demonstration of “the problem” (or one of the problems at any rate) that virtual list was invented to solve.
Demo file: scrolling-the-unscrollable-v2.zip
Howard Schlossberg’s presentation on popovers (FileMaker 13 Popovers) has inspired me on multiple occasions… a favorite takeaway is the idea that you can have a scrolling check box set within a popover. Continue reading
Note: Leaner does not always mean faster, especially if record counts will be large… in which case I would recommend going with the approach discussed in part 2.
[3 Jan 2018: demo updated to version 3.2 as per Jens Rasmussen’s comment below.]
[2 Nov 2017: demo updated to version 3.1 as per my exchange with Jonathan Mickelson in the comments section below.]
I thought after part 2 that this technique had been thoroughly discussed and dissected, but Geoff Gerhard of Creative Solutions writes to point out that, if the goal is to have as few moving parts as possible, the table occurrence (TO) count can be further reduced, from four to three…
…and he has provided a demo file which I am sharing with his permission.
Demo file: reciprocal-linkage-GGv3.2.zip
