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Level: Intermediate, Version: FM 12 or later

It’s Sorta a Value List Thing

Kevin Frank

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?

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Continue reading “It’s Sorta a Value List Thing” →

Level: Intermediate, Version: FM 12 or later

Tab Panels: Seen, Unseen and Simulated

Kevin Frank

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.

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Today’s demo files:

Continue reading “Tab Panels: Seen, Unseen and Simulated” →

Level: Intermediate, Version: FM 12 or later

Conditional Tab Panel Access

Kevin Frank

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

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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” →

Level: Intermediate, Version: FM 10 or later, Virtual List

Conditional Subsummary Report in Browse Mode

Kevin Frank

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.

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Continue reading “Conditional Subsummary Report in Browse Mode” →

Level: Intermediate, Version: FM 10 or later

Summary Reporting Tricks

Kevin Frank

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.

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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.

Continue reading “Summary Reporting Tricks” →

Level: Intermediate, Version: FM 12 or later

Benford’s Law

Kevin Frank

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.

8-11-2013 9-39-15 PMEach 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?

Continue reading “Benford’s Law” →

Level: Intermediate, Version: FM 12 or later

PDF Catalog with Table of Contents

Kevin Frank

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…

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Continue reading “PDF Catalog with Table of Contents” →

Chart, ExecuteSQL, Level: Advanced, Version: FM 12 or later

Weekly Sales Comparison Charts

Kevin Frank

If you are responsible for helping business decision makers analyze data, you are probably familiar with questions like:

  • Are we on track to meet or exceed last year’s sales totals?
  • How is our sales team doing now, compared to this time a year or two ago?

Today’s demo file, weekly sales comparison charts, v3, can help answer these questions. It consists of an Employee table with 20 records, a Sales table with approximately 40,000 records, seven chart types, and an option to chart weekly amounts either individually or cumulatively.

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When we look at the weeks individually, it’s clear that Zola Buchanan’s sales figures are mixed so far this year, compared to 2011 and 2012. But what may not be immediately apparent is whether overall she’s doing better, the same, or worse.

Continue reading “Weekly Sales Comparison Charts” →