Today we’re going to dig a little deeper into the new-in-18 While function, and to avoid repetition, will assume readers are familiar with last month’s article on SetRecursion and While. We’ll look at some new examples ranging from basic to advanced, investigate the circumstances under which While can use variables previously declared via Let, and check out some benchmark results comparing While vs. CustomList.
Author’s note: Inevitable comparisons will be drawn between the new While function and the venerable CustomList custom function, which I wrote about at length several years ago. Preliminary testing indicates that CustomList is faster under certain circumstances and While is faster under others. In my opinion, both of them belong in your developer tool kit.
Today we’re going to take a look at two new functions introduced in FileMaker 18: SetRecursion and While, and you can follow along in today’s demo files if you are so inclined.
Demo files: While-Sandbox.zip and Maclaurin-Series.zip
Today we’re going to look at a design pattern I’ve recently been using to accommodate a client request. The request is to be able to view and edit a parent, all related children, and all related grandchildren via a single “flattened” interface.
Demo file: magic-portals.zip (requires FM 16 or later) Continue reading “Magic Portals”
29 Mar 2019: Demo file has been updated to v2. See comments for details.
Editor’s note: Geoff Gerhard of Creative Solutions is one of those “quiet” developers who has been helpfully sharing his knowledge in online FileMaker forums for more than 20 years. I personally have benefited enormously from his expertise, and am pleased to feature his first appearance as a guest author here on FileMaker Hacks.
Demo file: BillOfMaterialsDemo-v2.zip
Today I want to talk about a potential problem lurking in a small percentage of FileMaker solutions, and discuss various options for mitigating it.
As you may know, there are three ways to display a new window…
…and it’s this last option that can, depending on circumstances, be problematical.
I say “depending on circumstances” because typically it’s okay for a user to spawn a new window, which is to say that doing so doesn’t pose any challenges beyond those the developer already faces when building a multi-user system, which presumably the developer has considered and has intelligently dealt with.
It’s been a few years since we last had a tips ‘n’ tricks article here at FileMaker Hacks, and during the interim some new items have accumulated in the old developer bag of tricks. (If you like this sort of thing, you may also want to check out part 1 and part 2.) Some of these are obscure, and one is very basic. Ideally developers at all levels of expertise will find something useful (or worth arguing about) in what follows.
I recall Corn Walker introducing a DevCon session by saying, “I’m just a kid who paid attention in math class.” Along similar lines I pay attention when smart people share their hard-won wisdom, and a number of the following tips come from these individuals with (what I hope is) proper attribution.
Some FileMaker functions require one or more arguments, e.g., Sum () or Evaluate ()… some do not require an argument, e.g., Random… and there is a single function where the argument is optional, i.e., the function can stand alone without parentheses like so…
Function
…or with parentheses like so:
Function ( argument )
Do you know which one it is? (See further discussion at the end of this article.) Continue reading “Tips ’n’ Tricks, part 3”
Recently we’ve looked at two methods to generate a “faux” subsummary to address a shortcoming of FileMaker native subsummaries… namely that in a multipage report you can have orphaned entries at the top of a given page with no indication of what parent entity they belong to.
The methods were documented here:
One limitation of both the above approaches is that they only worked with fixed-height report rows. Well today we have a nice, outside the box solution from Daniel Wood that does not suffer from this limitation.
Demo file: Faux-Subsummaries-with-Variable-Height-Rows.zip (requires FM 16 or later) Continue reading “Faux Subsummaries with Variable Height Rows”
Today we’re going to take another look at a challenge we discussed last time (in Conditional Summary Report Header)… namely how to cajole FileMaker into displaying a subsummary, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, at the top of a report page when items in the group begin on an earlier page.
Demo file: Faux Subsummaries via JSON + Virtual List
Continue reading “Faux Subsummaries via JSON + Virtual List”
This a quick followup to last month’s part 2, because today I want to to dig a little deeper into JSONSetElement and take a closer look at the first argument:
As I wrote last time…
Part of what makes JSONSetElement so powerful is that it can be used both to create new entries, and to update existing entries. Specify a valid address, and it will either create the entry if it doesn’t already exist, or update it if it does.
Let’s talk about the update aspect first, because it’s extremely straight forward. If you have existing JSON in a variable, for example $$simpleJSON, you can update it (i.e., add new elements or change existing elements) like so:
In other words, you use your existing JSON as the first argument.
But when it comes to creating new JSON, there are three possible first arguments to consider.
At the risk of stating the obvious, in the first two cases we are being explicit, but in the third case we are not. (Note: If you’re unclear on the distinction between objects and arrays, this was covered in great detail in part 1.)
