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 three […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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: I threw together a demo file, ForgetSummary, to compare the [...]
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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… …and [...]
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I got a request the other day to show a running balance in reverse order in a portal, in other words, 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] Running balances, a.k.a. “running totals” are summary [...]
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If you are responsible for helping business decision makers analyze data, you are probably familiar with questions like: Are we on track to meet or exceed last years sales totals? How is our sales team doing now, compared to this time a year or two ago? Today’s demo file, weekly sales comparison charts, can help [...]
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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 [...]
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Last October I began a series on Outer Joins, which explored a number of different techniques 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, [...]
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Disclaimer: This article contains speculative and experimental techniques that are in the proof-of-concept stage. Use at your own risk and test thoroughly. Today we’re going to delve further into the concept of virtual calculations, picking up where we left off last time, and with the assumption that readers are familiar with the material in part 1 [...]
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Disclaimer: This article contains speculative and experimental techniques that are in the proof-of-concept stage. Use at your own risk and test thoroughly. In part 1 of this series, we defined radical separation as a separation model scenario in which the developer no longer has access to a data file once a solution had been deployed. [...]
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I’ve said before, and no doubt will say again, that one of my favorite things about this blog is how much I learn from your feedback and the demo files you send me. Recently I received a file from Otmar Kramnis of the Hochschule Luzern demonstrating the fastest SQL-based method I have yet seen to [...]
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Disclaimer: This article contains speculative and experimental techniques that are in the proof-of-concept stage. Use at your own risk and test thoroughly. Earlier this month I had the honor and the privilege to do a presentation on the topic of Radical Separation at the PauseOnError un-conference in Portland, Oregon, which included a demo file resembling this [...]
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Has this ever happened to you? You have a number of identically named fields in two different tables… …but when you copy one of those fields from a layout based on the first table… … and paste it onto a layout based on the second one… …the result is not what you might have wished [...]
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A while back my youngest son, who is an avid Go player, asked me, “Is it true there are more possible Go games than there are atoms in the universe?” “Absolutely,” I replied, “Let’s fire up FileMaker Pro and prove it.” (I wasn’t about to let a rare teachable moment slip by.) “If memory serves, [...]
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Recently I received a dual-technique FileMaker 12 demo from Eden Morris. Here’s what he had to say about technique #1: In the Relationships Graph I show the use of colored labels to indicate where record creation, cascade deletes, and sorted relationships. Looking at the graph it easily shows that I can create customers from a [...]
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Editor’s note: Today I’m pleased to present a guest article by Michael Rocharde, author of FileMaker & Me, an interactive multimedia book focusing on FileMaker Interface Design. FileMaker has always been an incredible tool for generating reports and for many years, I used to have a report screen with banks of buttons to generate all [...]
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Dear Reader, There’s an old saying that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but having experienced it first hand, I’m not feeling even remotely flattered. Pissed off? Yes. Violated? Yes. But not flattered, and not amused. Here’s the short version: Me: The Impostor: Here’s a longer version (and I hope you’ll read to the [...]
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Editor’s note: Today we have a guest article written by John Weinshel, whose knowledge of SQL in general, and FileMaker+SQL in particular, runs deep. John’s contributions in various online forums are always worth reading, and it’s a privilege to present his thoughts on this topic here. The new ExecuteSQL() function in Filemaker 12 does not [...]
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First off, a bit of housekeeping: we now have bright, shiny Print and PDF buttons at the top right of every article. They work like a charm, and I appreciate the suggestions from several of you that motivated me to install them. Well, we’ve reached part 4 in this series that has been going on [...]
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Welcome to the third installment in this series. We’ve been exploring various issues and behaviors in connection with 2-column value lists (VL’s), and today we’re going to look at, and propose a work around for, an issue with filtered value lists in Find mode. All of today’s demo files feature a basic expense submission system, [...]
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In part 1 we explored a particular type of value list: the field-based two-column variety, based on all values, and set to show values from the second column only… …and today’s article assumes familiarity with that material. This time around we’re going to look at some challenges and issues that can arise when using filtered [...]
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Beverly Voth has produced a PDF version of The Missing FM 12 ExecuteSQL Reference with some additional material not available in her original posting from October 19th. And the SQL4_fmdev2.fmp12 demo file has been updated with new queries. Thank you Beverly for this major contribution to the FileMaker community.
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There seem to be many questions about the usage of SQL (Structured Query Language) with the ExecuteSQL function in FileMaker 12. This tutorial attempts to explain some of the SQL terms, if you are new to writing SQL statements. Since there are already many examples of how to write the ExecuteSQL queries, links to these [...]
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