Picking up where we left off in part 1, today we’re going to take a look at examples 2 through 6 in the Virtual List Charts demo file (the demo has been updated since part 1, so I recommend downloading a fresh copy).
We covered example 1 and most of the general concepts last time, so today we’re mainly going to touch on specific points of interest, but to briefly recap… Continue reading “FM 13: Virtual List Charts, part 2”
Today we’re going to look at applying the virtual list technique to FileMaker charting with the goal of producing a reusable chart “object”, or rather, a series of chart objects. We’ll need more than one because while certain attributes (e.g., chart title) can be set programmatically, others, including type (e.g., column or line), must be hard-coded into the chart object.
We’ve already explored Bruce Robertson’s virtual list on this site a number of times, but briefly, you create a utility table in your solution to facilitate non-standard viewing, reporting, etc., and pre-populate it with “more records than you’ll ever need”. The records in this table will derive their data “virtually”, by parsing it from an array — typically one or more $$variables.
Well it turns out the technique can be applied to charting as well, and today we have a demo file, Virtual List Charts, that contains six examples: three for Web Visits…
Recently a question came up on the FMP Experts list re: the possibility of displaying a found set of customers in 3 columns in browse mode in FileMaker 13. While FileMaker doesn’t naturally display data this way, there are various ways to trick it into doing so, and today we’re going to look at a method that combines the new-in-13 Summary List field type with the Virtual List technique.
Demo file: FM 13 Summary List + Virtual List
Last time we looked at several summary reporting tricks, including a conditional subsummary (when an item’s Status is “Scheduled” it will have a value in the Substatus field — otherwise Substatus will be blank). The challenge was to generate a summary report showing Substatus only where appropriate, without seeing any annoying empty gray rows beneath Pending, Cancelled or Completed. And last week’s report worked fine… in preview mode.
Continue reading “Conditional Subsummary Report in Browse Mode”
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”
Update 4 Sep 2012: Preliminary testing indicates that the “line swallowing bug” alluded to below has been fixed in FileMaker 12. Also, in FM 12, the maximum layout length and width have been increased to 444 inches (32,000 pt).
There was a time, many years ago, when the maximum number of characters you could store in a FileMaker text field was 64,000. With the introduction of FileMaker 7 in 2004, that limit was expanded to approximately one billion characters (2 Gb of data divided by 2 bytes per Unicode character), i.e., more than you or I will typically ever need.
But while the capacity of a text field expanded astronomically, the maximum length of a layout remained unchanged at 110 inches (ten 8.5 x 11 inch pages), leading to a dichotomous situation where FileMaker can store vastly more data in a field than it can easily preview, print or output to PDF.
For example, let’s say you’ve decided to build a data warehouse for public domain literary works. Continue reading “Long Documents in FileMaker 11”
Demo file: 2010-12-13-export to ical
The other day I needed to export some appointments from FileMaker to iCal. I’d never done this before, but I did a bit of reading on Wikipedia and elsewhere, and it turns out to be fairly straight forward. I don’t claim that what follows is in any way authoritative, just that it works… and not just with iCal, but with Outlook, Google Calendar and any other program that recognizes the iCalendar format.
Let’s start with a basic table of appointments, like this.
We’re going to create an “ics” file, which is a text file with three distinct elements. At the beginning of the file is the header, which looks like this:
BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//FileMaker Pro//NONSGML yourSolutionNameHere//EN
Next we have one or more body entries that look like this:
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Marketing Meeting
UID:00188BD54F5D-63427112000-1000028
DTSTAMP:20101206T180000Z
DTSTART:20101206T180000Z
DTEND:20101206T193000Z
END:VEVENT
And at the very end of the file comes the footer, which looks like this:
END:VCALENDAR
Continue reading “Exporting Data to iCal, Outlook, Google Calendar, etc.”
