Welcome to the third installment in this series. We’ve been exploring various issues and behaviors in connection with 2-column value lists (VL’s), and today we’re going to look at, and propose a work around for, an issue with filtered value lists in Find mode.
All of today’s demo files feature a basic expense submission system, with each portal row representing a receipt that the submitter would like to be reimbursed for. Here it is in Browse mode:
And here’s the Relationships Graph:
Update 20 Aug 2012: Dr. Noda has updated the demo files to include Rob Russell’s clever fill graphic trick (as per the responses following the article). Thank you Rob and Dr. Noda.
As promised last time, today we’re going to look at a technique from Dr. Osamu Noda, which uses FM 12’s ExecuteSQL to create what appears to be a value list when in fact there are no value lists defined at all.
This technique, like some of the others we’ve seen recently, is decidedly esoteric, but it shows some clever outside-the-box thinking, and I appreciate Dr. Noda taking the time to share the demo (ValueListWithoutDefinition-RR-Edition) and write up his notes. One of the things I particularly like about this technique is that it allows the order of the value list items to be customized, even though the values come from a table.
One of the things I love about FileMaker is how many different ways there are to skin the proverbial cat. Following our recent look at “Magic Value Lists,” I received thought-provoking FileMaker 12 demos from John Ahn and Dr. Osamu Noda.
I’m going to save Dr. Noda’s files for next time, but today we have two variations on a demo which resulted from a discussion with Nick Chapin on FileMaker TechNet. Actually, the first variation is from John (lib_valueLists_john_ahn_mod), and the second is an alternate approach that I came up with. If you’re a TechNet member (registration is free), you can read the original discussion here. At any rate, the objectives were:
Let’s start with John’s version.
This is the value list table:
27 Mar 2017: see User-Friendly Excel Exports, part 6 for an updated approach.
Well, we’ve reached what may well be the final posting in this extended series of articles. We’ve covered a lot of ground, and this article assumes familiarity with what has come before (in parts 1, 1.1, 2, 3 and 4).
Today we’re going to look at a couple “Virtual List” implementations of the User-Friendly Excel Export technique, which will, among other things, allow us to eliminate these calculated fields from the Contacts table…
…as well as the corresponding set of fields in Donations.
Bruce Robertson’s Virtual List technique has made a couple previous appearances on FileMaker Hacks…
…so I won’t rehash its merits in detail here, but if you aren’t familiar with it, I recommend you check out one or both of these earlier articles. Continue reading “User-Friendly Excel Exports, part 5”
March 9, 2010 is a date I recall quite clearly: not only was it the release date for FileMaker 11; it was also the day a bunch of my FileMaker SQL code broke, due to changes in the FM 11 internal SQL parser.
If you’re new to this subject, or perhaps a bit rusty, I have written about internal SQL (a.k.a. FQL) on various occasions over the last year, and there are a number of important points that I won’t discuss today, because they have already been mentioned in one or more of these articles:
What follows is by no means exhaustive, but merely what I’ve documented. There is no comprehensive source of information about FQL, although chapter 7 of the FileMaker 11 OBDC and JDBC Guide is a good place to start (just remember that not everything you read there will apply to FQL).
Continue reading “FileMaker 11 Internal SQL Changes, part 1”
Last week we looked at building a FileMaker 11 native chart based on data that has been parsed into a field-based array.
I happen to like field-based arrays, for reasons I’ll get to in a minute, but is a field-based array really necessary to generate the above chart? Continue reading “Array Charting, part 2”
