Dynamic Value List from count of records within a portal

[Rich S]

Happy holidays, everybody!

(Please refer to the attachment.) This is a portal that lists company names from the CompanyName child table. On its right is a field (SortOrder) that contains a numeric value that a user would enter that in turn, causes the company names to change their sort order in a different part of the solution. That part works fine.

To make it a little more elegant/easier for the user to enter a number in SortOrder, I'd like to create a dynamic value list from which it would list numbers from 1 to X, with X being the count of records inside the portal, e.g., if there are 8 company names within the portal then the value list would contain the numbers (sans commas)  1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. The user would then go down the SortOrder column selecting from the value list until all the numbers are used.

I tried a few calculations but none of them worked so your help would be appreciated.

TIA for your assistance!

Edited December 14, 2017 by WF7A

[Fitch]

I know this isn't really an answer to your question, but since nobody has chimed in... personally I wouldn't be pleased to have to select a number from a list when I could easily type in a number. Like when a credit card form makes me select a month or year for expiration. I know it may help them, but from my perspective it insults my intelligence and is annoying.

Is it really so bad just typing in the number? If so, maybe there's some other approach? What's the ultimate goal -- why are they doing the sort?

[Rich S]

I agree and feel the same way, but there's a reason for this: to fend off any potential confusion for new users*. More than likely there will be more records than what they'll will see in the portal (before scrolling), so it alerts them that they will have to scroll through all the records to number them all. (...and they have to number them all for an attached script to work.)

 

*The users have little-to-no experience with databases so I'm trying to make it really simple for them. I may be understimating the intelligence of the users but if I can make a solution as bulletproof and intuitive as possible it'll be less work for me in the future.

Edited December 14, 2017 by WF7A

[Pavlk]

WF7A, are you still looking for help here?

[Rich S]

Please!  We're still waffling over whether to include this scheme or not so if I could learn how to do it then I could present it to our test users to see if they're insulted or not. : )

[Pavlk]

I came up with a solution. Please check it. I think there may be ways to improve it that I couldn't find. Or maybe it is the best one (=

 

 

Portal sorting.fmp12

[Rich S]

Thanks! I'll take a look at it next week when I return home.

[bcooney]

Wouldn't this be in a prefs UI and accessed by Admin users? So, a limited audience? I'd also suggest to that user to enter the sort order value in tens ( 10, 20, 30 ...). That makes is much easier to insert a value between two existing values without completely renumbering.

However, what does this sort order represent? Where is it used that a type-ahead popup picker wouldn't  help?

[Rich S]

The sort order represents the appearance of companies in a list which would typically number fewer than 20; users can either custom sort the company names (using the Sort Order field) instead of using the default of descending date order (detrmined in another field). The lower the sort order number assigned to a company name the higher its name will appear in the list.

Since there will likely be more than eight companies (the number of "slots" in the portal), the idea was to cue the user that "Hey, you have more than eight companies so since you can only see eight at a time (using the slider),  here are the numbers you haven't (or have) used so you can see which numbers are still available."

I showed a handful of "my people" Pavlk's solution this morning and they said, "Wouldn't it be easier if we moved the address field over here and extend the length of the portal?" I  said, "Sure," so that's what we're going to do; keeping it simple is always a winner. : )

Thank you all again for your time.