11 Sep 2012: The ConditionalVL_SQL demo has been updated to fix a minor bug.
Yesterday I had the pleasure of co-presenting a DevCon “Unconference” session with John Ahn on the topic of ExecuteSQL. I wasn’t sure if there would be much interest in this somewhat geeky subject, but the room was packed, and the audience ran the gamut from SQL newbies to SQL power users.
We started out with a basic intro, and showed a few simple demos. Next we moved on to a discussion of some of the issues, nuances, gotchas, etc. Then John showed a couple ExecuteSQL-powered demos which I strongly commend to your attention: a) Multi-Column Dynamic Portal Sorting…
…and b) Dynamic Value Lists…
…which, incidentally, caused every jaw in the room to drop, due to the fact that John’s method of constructing these conditional value lists seems to violate at least one fundamental law of FileMaker physics — more on this in an upcoming posting.
Here are links to everything we referred to during the presentation, in roughly chronological order.
FileMaker Hacks postings:
- FM 12 ExecuteSQL, part 1
- FM 12 ExecuteSQL, part 2
- FM 12 ExecuteSQL: Dynamic Parameters, part 1
- FM 12 ExecuteSQL: Dynamic Parameters, part 2
- FM 12 ExecuteSQL: Robust Coding, part 1
- FM 12 ExecuteSQL: Robust Coding, part 2
John Ahn’s demos:
- Multi-Column Dynamic Portal Sorting (Portal_sort_multiple)
- Dynamic Value Lists (ConditionalVL_SQL)
Other links: