Tag: UniqueValues

Level: Intermediate, Version: FM 16 or later

FM 22: Pseudo Indexing

Kevin Frank

Demo file: FM-22-Pseudo-Indexing.zip (works w/ FM 16 or later)

When I wrote about Sort Values and Unique Values back in 2017, I made passing reference to an article I’d written a couple years previously on the topic of “pseudo indexing“, i.e., displaying a list of unique values for a specific field for a found set, rather than for all records.

Actually, I wish things were that simple. Full disclosure: there was the original FM 13 demo/article. Then when FM 16 was released, I did a second demo/article, “FM 16 Pseudo Indexing”. Recently I discovered a flaw in the approach I used in the FM 16 article, so I am pulling that demo and article off line in favor of this one.

Today we’re going to dust off the old pseudo indexing demo, and update it to take advantage of various FileMaker functions and innovations that were not available back in 2015. Why bother? Here’s why: the new implementation…

  1. is simpler (has fewer moving parts)
  2. scales better
  3. is less brittle (prone to breakage if schema is renamed)
  4. enables you to bring new fields on board faster
  5. can sort the pseudo index in ascending or descending order

Continue reading “FM 22: Pseudo Indexing” →

Level: Advanced, Version: FM 13 or later, Virtual List

Virtual List Reporting, part 3

Kevin Frank

Update 30 September 2021: while this article is worth reading for background information, I now recommend using the approach utilized here: Virtual List Reporting, part 4

Last year I posted a couple articles on the topic of virtual list reporting (part 1 and part 2), a.k.a. VLR. Today we’re going to look at some additional things you can do with VLR, and to avoid a lot of repetition, this article will assume the reader is familiar with the material covered in part 1, wherein benefits are extolled and fundamentals explained.

2017-07-21_18-46-06

Demo file: VLR-part-3.zip  (3.4 Mb compressed)

Did you notice in parts 1 and 2 that we were limited to producing a single report at a time? Yes, we could sequentially output them and concatenate them into a PDF, but we couldn’t display multiple reports on-screen simultaneously, nor could we interact with them in browse mode.

This time around we’re going to look at a method to produce multiple independent reports concurrently, each in its own window, based on a single virtual list table. This will entail generating a large number of dynamically instantiated $$vars[withReps], so we will also explore a way to automatically clear them out (without the overhead of having to keep track of them during instantiation).

Disclaimer/Warning: before running multiple Customer reports, open your Data Viewer and activate the Watch tab. You don’t want to display the Current tab with 5K or more variables in memory, unless you’ve got a lot of… time… on… your… hands.

Continue reading “Virtual List Reporting, part 3” →

Level: Intermediate, Version: FM 16 or later

FM 16: SortValues and UniqueValues

Kevin Frank

[Update 1 July 2017: demo file has been updated to make the found set tracking more robust; article text has been revised to reflect this.]

Today we’re going to look at two functions introduced in FileMaker 16: SortValues and UniqueValues, and you may want to download and follow along in this demo file: SortValues & UniqueValues (requires FM 16 or later).

Each of these functions operates on a return-delimited list of values, and the names are self explanatory: SortValues allows you to intelligently sort the list in ascending or descending order, and UniqueValues removes duplicate entries. Continue reading “FM 16: SortValues and UniqueValues” →