Editor’s note: Today I’m pleased to present a guest article and accompanying demo file written by Joel Englander on using ExecuteSQL + a global multi-line key as an alternative to FileMaker’s built-in portal filtering mechanism, with dynamic portal sorting included as an added bonus.
Demo file: fm-sqlportal-filter-and-dynsort.zip (75 Mb compressed, 230 Mb uncompressed)
Recently I had an on-screen reporting challenge, and decided to try several different approaches to see which would be fastest. The challenge: Starting with two tables, one containing 20 Employees, and one containing 2,000 Sales records for the current year…
…display daily sales totals per employee in a seven-day grid, like so:
The question on one or more of the FileMaker forums was asked and answered. Q: How do you get the Count() of the related records in a filtered portal? A: (paraphrased) duplicate the filtered portal and make it one row in height. Place the related summary field, “Count of…”, in the single row filtered portal. Voila! your count is now filter-specific. (The instructions for creating the filter for a portal and summary field are below.)
This recent topic led me to consider what other aggregate fields could be used with the filtered portal. And what about that Go To Related Record script step? Does it only show the related FILTERED records or all related records? The demo (bvoth_aggregates_in_portals.fmp12) and article have been created to answer these questions.
I started using filtered portals in cross-tab reports shortly after they were introduced. These are generally ways to show something very specific in each portal with sorts and filters and usually one row only. I had not explored the use of aggregates in these cross-tab reports until now.
Kudos to those before me that may have discovered these answers and tricks, too.
Continue reading “Aggregates (Summary Fields) in Filtered Portals”
Have you ever wished there were an easy way to summarize the contents of one portal in another portal? Perhaps something along the lines of the “Summary” portal below?
I’ve touched on the possibility of using a portal to produce (or assist in the production of) an on-screen summary report a couple times in the past…
…but today we’re going to look at a fresh approach, and if you wish, you can follow along in today’s demo file, fm11-summary-report-in-a-portal, which uses a filtered portal and therefore requires FileMaker 11 or later. Continue reading “Summary Report in a Filtered Portal”
Today we’re going to take another look at the challenge we encountered in part 1 of this series. The challenge is: given a simple database consisting of Products, Invoices and Invoice Line Items, how can we show total sales per product filtered by date range?
One thing is certain: assuming a normalized data model (with the date in the Invoices table), some sort of trick will be required. In part 1, we leveraged the FileMaker relational model to solve this problem, by adding additional table occurrences to the Relationships Graph, as well as some calculated fields in the products table. Continue reading “Filtered Relations, part 2”
