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:
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”
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”
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.
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?
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:
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…
I got a request the other day to show a running balance in reverse order in a portal… i.e., from oldest at the bottom to newest at the top. Surprisingly, FileMaker does not provide an obvious way to accomplish this. [Demo file: running total in reverse]
If you are responsible for helping business decision makers analyze data, you are probably familiar with questions like:
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.
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.
Disclaimer: This article contains speculative and experimental techniques that are in the proof-of-concept stage. Use at your own risk and test thoroughly.
FYI: In March at the Portland PauseOnError un-conference, Matt Navarre and I had a freewheeling Separation Model discussion, a podcast of which has just been posted as episode 85 at FileMaker Talk.
Welcome to the fourth and final installment in our series on Radical Separation. Today’s article assumes familiarity with part 1, part 2 & part 3, and continues in the direction we were headed at the end of part 3. Specifically, we will finish up our exploration of “virtual calculations” by examing an intriguing approach suggested by Barry Isakson to a) reduce the field count, b) solve the “define more fields than you’ll ever need” problem, and c) accommodate summary fields, and I invite you to follow along in today’s demo file, Virtual Calculations, Part 4, if you are so inclined.
Last October I began a series on Outer Joins, which explored a number of different ways to display summarized information in a grid, and at the time I concluded that the “fastest” method was to leverage the FileMaker relational model. And it was plenty fast, locally… and not too bad on a LAN… and technically, it was the fastest method on a WAN but only because the other methods we looked at were even dog-slower than it was.
I like to test solutions on a WAN, even if they’re only going to be deployed on a LAN, because it’s a great way to uncover performance bottlenecks. But recently I needed to deploy a summarized grid on a WAN, and was incentivised to come up with something faster… and after a bit (well, okay, a lot) of trial and error settled on the approach we’re going to look at today. To cut to the chase, with a million records in the test file, the previous best grid rendering time of 11 seconds on a WAN has been reduced by a factor of 10, to just over one second.
