This is a follow up to last week’s Fast Summaries to JSON and will assume the reader is familiar with that material.
Demo Files
After last week’s article appeared, a reader contacted me wondering whether the technique could be adapted to provide a more literal JSON representation of what was visible on-screen. The answer turns out to be yes, with a bit of additional work…
The other day some colleagues were discussing a need to produce a JSON representation of the data in a summary report. Long time readers of this blog will know that I am obsessed with fond of the Fast Summary technique, and it seemed like it might be a good fit for this challenge, so I built some demos to find out if that would be the case.
Demos 1 and 4 will work with FM 16 or later. Demos 2 & 3 utilize recently-added JSON features, so require FM 21 or later.
Demo file: on-window-transaction-json-v2.zip
Credentials: admin / admin
Minimum version: 20.2 [for both client and server]
Note: This demo file is optimized for Perform Script on Server (PSOS), and is intended to be hosted on FileMaker Server or FileMaker Cloud.
Recently a colleague mentioned that they were running into a performance issue trying to load a complex found set (customers, invoices and line items) as an array of objects into a $$variable. It was simply taking too long across a WAN connection, and contributing factors included unstored calculations referencing related unstored calculations, and the rendering taking place client side as opposed to server side.
We’ve explored rendering a found set as JSON here previously…
…but both of the above involve constructing the JSON on the fly at runtime. My colleague was hoping for something faster, and today we’re going to look at a fresh approach. Continue reading “OnWindowTransaction JSON”
Demo file: found-set-to-json-object.zip (40MB; requires FM 18 or later)
[Author’s note: the demo file is a work in progress. Modify it as you see fit.]
Today we’re going to compare various methods one might consider employing to render an arbitrary found set as a JSON object. The demo consists of a table of US customers with 250K records, and the JSON object will be structured like so…
{
State Name:
{ County : [ [ customer array ] , [ customer array ] ... ] ,
County : [ [ customer array ] , [ customer array ] ... ] ,
...
} ,
State Name:
{ County : [ [ customer array ] , [ customer array ] ... ] ,
County : [ [ customer array ] , [ customer array ] ... ] ,
...
} ,
...
}
…i.e., grouped by state name and county, with customer data represented as a two-dimensional array, for example: Continue reading “Render Found Set as JSON Object”
Today we’re going to take another look at a challenge we discussed last time (in Conditional Summary Report Header)… namely how to cajole FileMaker into displaying a subsummary, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, at the top of a report page when items in the group begin on an earlier page.
Demo file: Faux Subsummaries via JSON + Virtual List
Continue reading “Faux Subsummaries via JSON + Virtual List”