[Editor’s note: On Dec 13, 2013, Howard Schlossberg gave a presentation to the FM-DiSC group on the subject of FileMaker 13 popovers, which was very well received, and which I’m proud to share here with his permission.]
Generating Sample Data
Have you ever wanted to generate sample data for one of your solutions that was random in certain ways, but within a defined range or scope? For example, assuming an invoicing solution with existing tables of customers and products…
- choose 20 customers at random
- create between 4 and 8 invoices for each of them
- dated anywhere between 1 September and 31 December 2013
- choose products at random
- from the subset of products where price is between $30 and $50
- create between 5 and 25 line items per invoice
- with a quantity for each line item between 1 and 24
Wouldn’t it be nice to wave a magic wand to solve challenges like this? Well, I have some good news: Jesse Antunes and Geoff Coffey made that magic wand available, in the form of a custom function, back in 2007 on the SixFriedRice blog (Creating Random Numbers in FileMaker)… but I confess that I didn’t really grasp how useful it could be till Beverly Voth mentioned it in her article on Aggregates in Filtered Portals.
It’s Sorta a Value List Thing
Editor’s note: Today it’s my privilege to present an informative guest article written by Jonathan Fletcher on the elusive topic of sorted dynamic value lists. Jonathan is a well-regarded, thoughtful and thought-provoking fixture in the FileMaker community, known for his generous and frequent contributions to various online FileMaker forums.
Have you ever had a need for a value list that displayed a generated list of years in descending order? Have you ever had a client ask for a popup of dynamic characteristics or statuses in the order they are most often employed by the users?
Tab Panels: Seen, Unseen and Simulated
Last time we examined some of the nuances of tab controls, both visible and invisible. Today we’re going to extend the exploration to include simulated and, in demo 5, genuine tab interfaces for layout navigation.
Today’s demo files:
Conditional Tab Panel Access
Challenge: in a system with three privilege sets, Employee, Manager and Administrator, you want to control access to various panels on this tab control like so:
- Employees have access to tabs 1,2,3
- Managers have access to tabs 1,2,3,4,5
- Administrators and Developers have unrestricted access
As usual in the FileMaker world, there are various approaches you could take, and today we’re going to look at three of them with the help of these demos: Continue reading “Conditional Tab Panel Access”
Conditional Subsummary Report in Browse Mode
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”
Summary Reporting Tricks
One of the best ways to learn about a particular FileMaker feature or behavior is to build a demo. You might build one in response to a client request, or to try to answer a question somone has asked, or just to see what happens. At any rate, today we’re going to look at three demos, each of which explores some aspect of summary reporting. For reasons of backward compatibility today’s demos are in .fp7 format, but you can convert them to .fmp12 format if you are so inclined.
What these three demos have in common is multiple sub-summary parts on reporting layouts… so what you see on the report depends on how you sort it.
Benford’s Law
A common exercise in freshman courses on statistics and probability is to divide the students into two groups, let’s call them A and B.
Each student in group A is instructed to flip a coin 100 times and record the resulting sequence of heads and tails. Each student in group B is instructed to merely pretend to have done so, and write down the fictional sequence. The sequences are submitted anonymously to the professor, but invariably the professor correctly determines which group they belong to.
Take a look at the example at right. If you were the professor would you assume it comes from group A or from group B? Would it strike you as suspicious that the first six tosses alternate between T and H with perfect regularity, or that starting with toss 12, there are five H’s in a row?
ForgetSummary()
One of my favorite FileMaker functions is GetSummary; I use it frequently, and it had never occurred to me that there might be any alternative. Recently, however, Mikhail Edoshin pointed out on the FMPExperts list that GetLayoutObjectAttribute can serve as a viable replacement, like so:
PDF Catalog with Table of Contents
Recently I was asked by a client whether we could produce a PDF catalog from his company’s database, with products grouped by manufacturer. Me: “Of course, this is FileMaker.” Him: “Can it have a table of contents?” Me: “Yeah, sure, no problem.”
Actually, it took some trial and error, but we got there eventually…
