Using dynamic global variables for portal filtering for user accounts

[dinamo]

Hello,

New to the forum and a FileMaker novice.  I'm working on a solution at work that contains multiple portals and I'm trying to work out the best way to filter them.  

Currently I'm filtering the records in the portals by creation date and completion status.  I have buttons which toggle the state of global fields "FILTER_DATE" and "FILTER_COMPLETE" and that works ok. It filters the portals successfully but it sorts all the portals on that record and I'm afraid having multiple users browsing the same record on different layouts will mess with the filter settings for each other.  As I continue to build the solution I feel like this method is going to get cumbersome with the amount of global fields I will need to manage.  I also would like to make the portal filters to be user account specific, which I can't see how to implement with this system of global fields.  

I had the thought that I could maybe write a script that creates a dynamic global field when a user presses a filter option.  The idea being that user "Adam" clicks on the "Filter Incomplete" button.  The button triggers a script which would then toggle a variable named something like "$$FILTER_COMPLETE & "_" & Get(AccountName)".  The portal can then access the appropriate variable using the same method, referencing the account name to filter the portal for that user.

Is this a common way of dealing with user settings?  Are the better methods for dealing with user settings?  In an ideal world each portal in my solution would have its own user specific filter settings.  There will be around 20 portals total and each would need to filter for 2-5 variables.

 

Thanks in advance for your input

[webko]

Something to know - a global field's value is unique to each user's session - they don't run into each other even when using the same field.

So you can use your global FILTER_DATE and FILTER_COMPETE fields for all users.

The other thing to remember is that these global fields are reset to their original default values every time a user logs in. If the value of FILETR_DATE was "2016" when the database was originally hosted, then that will be the value when a user starts a session. Then you can use a script to reset that user's global to different values...

Hope this helps

[dinamo]

Thanks, this is very helpful.  I may look in to adding separate sorting to each portal later in the solution but for now I can progress knowing that at least users wont conflict with each other using the global fields.