Transfer a Found Set to a UI File

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If you work with the separation model, or any other multi-file configuration where a layout in file A is based on a table in file B, you may have encountered the following situation: while FileMaker makes it easy to transfer a found set from file A to file B…

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…there is no obvious mechanism to go the other direction. Stated in other words, you can easily transfer a found set from an interface (a.k.a. UI) file to a data file, but not vice-versa. Nor for that matter, is there an obvious way to transfer a found set from one UI file to another UI file. Continue reading →

Life After Anchor/Buoy

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INTRODUCTION

Earlier this month I was contacted by a DevCon presenter asking permission to include some slides from my eleven-year old anchor/buoy materials as part of his presentation. I said I’d be honored, but then added, “You might mention that I haven’t used A/B on a new project in about eight years.” He asked what system I was using instead, and a number of other colleagues have wondered as well, which brings us to the topic of today’s article.

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Virtual List Reporting, part 2

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Welcome back for the second and concluding installment in our exploration of Virtual List Reporting (a.k.a. VLR). Demo file: VLR-part-2.zip

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To avoid repetition, this article will assume the reader is familiar with concepts and techniques introduced in part 1 (some of what follows may appear to be gibberish if the reader is not)… but to briefly recap, here are some benefits of VLR:

  • Flexible framework accommodates complex reporting challenges
  • Fast performance (we use the Multifind technique in this demo)
  • No need to tamper with schema in your data tables or on the relationships graph
  • Unlike traditional FM reports, you can easily combine data from unrelated tables (we saw this in report 6 in part 1)
  • Under certain circumstances, VLRs can be much faster to develop than traditional FM reports (as per discussion of report 3 in part 1)
    Continue reading →

Portal Threading in FM 15

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Today’s release of FileMaker Pro 15 brings a welcome performance boost in the form of in-line portal progress indicators, a.k.a threaded portals. Ian Jempson (@ianjempson) was kind enough to provide me with a test file that he built, and today’s demo file is based on Ian’s work, and shared with his permission. The purpose of the file is, a) to demonstrate portal threading in FM 15, and b) to explore the behavior of variables instantiated via portal filter calcs and/or object visibility.

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Demo file: fm15-portal-threading.zip (7.5 Mb)

Continue reading →

Virtual List Reporting, part 1

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Self-plagiarism alert: to avoid repeatedly referring the reader back to earlier virtual list articles, portions of text from those earlier articles are incorporated here.

Welcome to the first installment of a multi-part series on producing reports using the virtual list technique, or more properly, collection of techniques. Demo file: VLR-part-1.zip

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Invented and popularized by Bruce Robertson, virtual lists are incredibly flexible, and have made a number of appearances here in the past, including… Continue reading →

Set Variable by Name

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16 April 2017: custom function updated to facilitate auto-interpretation of dates (SetVarByName-v2.zip). See below for more info.

Recently, in the midst of various reporting and charting projects, I’ve found myself wishing for an easy way to “dynamically instantiate” one or more variables… in other words, set them by name, with the name determined programmatically, as opposed to being hard coded.

This issue has come up from time to time on this blog over the last five years or so, most notably in Dynamic Variable Instantiation, where I observed that…

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…and then proposed an unwieldy mass of gobbledygook as a workaround, e.g.,

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Actually, the preceding isn’t too bad for occasional use, especially if the value you’re passing to the variable is as simple as the GetSummary string shown above. Continue reading →

Fast Summaries Revisited

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If you do complex data analysis, then from time to time you probably need to group, summarize, and parse data into variables and/or fields. There are various ways to accomplish this, including the Fast Summary technique, which regular readers of this blog may be familiar with, as it has made a number of appearances here over the years.

Well today we’re going to look at a couple alternatives to Fast Summaries, with the help of some demo files, which you can use to do your own benchmarking.

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Or, if you’d rather not do your own benchmarking, scroll down to see results from my tests. Bottom line: each of these three techniques can be fastest, depending on circumstances.

(Also, if you’ve been putting off exploring Perform Script On Server, a.k.a. PSOS, host the demo files on FileMaker Server 13 or later. The reporting routine optionally uses PSOS, so you can dive in painlessly and see what you’ve been missing.) Continue reading →

PDF Trickery

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If you produce reports or other FileMaker output in PDF format, here’s a little trick that can be a real time saver in terms of development.

Imagine this: a client receives a nightly report via email in PDF format, and asks you to make sure it will fit on a single page in landscape orientation. The report always contains three groups of 12 records, with each group preceded by a leading subsummary, a latticework of horizontal and vertical gridlines, etc.

It is a busy, crowded report, but with patience and fine tuning, you manage to get everything to fit on a single page. Just. Barely.

Now the client wants you to add a trailing subsummary to each group, but of course still expects everything to fit on a single page. The report is already at 8pt type, with tight vertical margins, and you are not looking forward to a bunch of time-consuming heroic measures to accommodate this request, so instead you employ the following trick. Continue reading →

Obscure Multiple Window Issue

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Note: Thank you to Colleen Hammersley for bringing this issue to my attention, and to Howard Schlossberg for proposing a clever and elegant work around that addresses the issue on the Windows platform. (We’ll also look at another fix that works cross-platform.)

Today we’re going to explore a windowing behavior change that was introduced in FileMaker 12. If your solutions display multiple on-screen windows, then you may at some point find yourself facing this issue.

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The problem manifests in different ways on the Windows vs. Mac platforms; we’re going to start out by looking at what happens in FMP/Win via the Window Focus, v1 demo.

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Tips ’n’ Tricks, part 2

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Welcome back for a second dip into the developer bag of tips and tricks. A few of today’s entries assume familiarity with part 1, so if you haven’t already checked it out, I invite you to do so before proceeding.

We begin today with a couple ExecuteSQL tips.

Tip #1: Get to know COALESCE

The SQL Coalesce function takes a series of arguments and returns the first non-null result, like so:

COALESCE ( arg1 ; arg2 [; arg3 ; etc.] )

For example, given a table of customer data including these records…

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