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Level: Intermediate, Summary List, Version: FM 13 or later

Summary List Fields in FM 13, part 2

Kevin Frank

Welcome back for our second look at the new summary list field type in FileMaker 13. Today we have three demo files…

…which in addition to summary lists, utilize a couple other new-in-13 features: popovers and conditional invisibility. As in part 1, the core technique uses a summary list to facilitate relational found-set awareness (in demos 1 & 2). We’ll also apply a modified version of the technique to SQL queries (in demo 3).

Demo 1: FM 13 Summary List – MLK, v2  (reminder: we saw v1 in part 1)

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Continue reading “Summary List Fields in FM 13, part 2” →

Level: Intermediate, Version: FM 12 or later

Generating Sample Data

Kevin Frank

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.

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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” →