Calcs change from upper to lower

[LaRetta]

Well I've never noticed this before ...

Maybe it's because I've been working in SQL and they use UPPER quite a bit (for their functions) but I've started doing it in FM as well. I thought it was kinda cool because they stood out from regular text easily. So I started typing my calcs like:

Case (

thisField = "this"

OR

thisField = "that"

I began to capitalize OR. And AND. But FileMaker changes them back to all small letters! It is a small thing ... or should I say a 'lower' thing but it struck me as peculiar. It should work either way. Is FileMaker being fussy? If so, they've been around me too much.

Please tell me it happens for others besides me; otherwise I'll need a long vacation or a tall drink. Has it always been like this?

LaRetta

[Colin Keefe]

It sure does.

You'd think it wouldn't matter, since the calculation engine will accept case insensitive operators as well as field names, but since it always evaluates them back to the original case of fields and expected case of operators...presumably there's a reason on the back end.

Or it could just be a case of overzealous "tidying". Either way, you're not hallucinating.

[LaRetta]

Oh and why won't it take a bang for not!!??

UPDATE: I just learned bang and whack. Ha ha.

Edited January 22, 2008 by Guest

[Lee Smith]

I have no idea what Bang and Wack has to do with you original question???

However, FileMaker has always changed the operators to match what you see in the Edit box.

Lee

[Lee Smith]

the original case of fields

I hadn't notice this, I always thought it rejected it..

Lee

[LaRetta]

I didn't know that we were entitled to only one question particularly when it was rhetorical. I asked about bang because it is a function and whack is a ... well, a character used in URLs. Granted, I used their newly-learned slang terms but the question was quite valid; I've wondered why FM didn't adopt ! for not. And since we were discussing functions from the calc box, it just slipped out.

Me bad.

[comment]

I thought we admonished posters not to use slang terms (or at least to explain them when they do). For the record, I've never heard these terms before.

I suppose FM didn't adopt ! for not because it (FM) is oriented towards non-programmers.

Edited January 22, 2008 by Guest

[LaRetta]

I can only be admonished once per post - it's in the rules. Ha ha. Bang is ! and is whack. URL address is http[whack][whack]. But you're right, I should explain. I had JUST heard it while posting about capitalizing AND and it slipped out my fingers. It comes from a programmer. But I was serious about ! - it is normally used for 'not' and I had hoped someone would post with, 'well, it CAN be used if you escape it' or some other such response.

I like whack instead of saying 'exclaimation point'. It tickles me. The bang? Eh. But I was given them together so they both came out together.

[LaRetta]

Oh and thank you Colin, Lee and Michael for responding. I was so busy getting in trouble that I forgot to thank you.

UPDATE: It makes me feel like an outlaw. I think I like it. Alex, you around? I'm unsure why I thought of you when I said that!

Edited January 23, 2008 by Guest

[comment]

Actually, "whack" is a FORWARD slash (I looked it up), which would also fit your URL example.

I was serious about ! - it is normally used for 'not'

It depends on what you define as "normally". I don't think you can use it that way in Excel, for example. And I picked this example for a reason.

[LaRetta]

And I picked this example for a reason.

Okay, I'll bite because I can't seem to get enough punishment from this thread as it stands and, although I've considered it, I see no reason you picked Excel for your comparison except possibly that FM semi-cohabitates with them.

But at least Excel does NOT and not not. And it does AND and not and. :joust:

Edited January 23, 2008 by Guest

[comment]

I wasn't aware of administering punishment. I thought this was just a discussion.

I picked Excel, because it too is oriented primarily towards non-programmers, and has a somewhat similar learning curve (i.e. you can plod along by entering numbers and a sum here and there, or you can use it to make an incredibly complex application). Filemaker's calc syntax is closer to Excel more than to anything else I know - except it's even more primitive (I believe Shawn could add a few words here about how calcs are parsed, and why it wouldn't matter if the "code" could be shortened from "not" to "!").

I agree that logical operators would be better in all upper case. BTW, in Excel both AND and NOT are functions, and all function names use upper case only.

[LaRetta]

Yep, it's a discussion. But I was enjoying being bad; something I don't wear nearly enough.

I had another thought as well ... Excel has a TON of functions. In fact, you, Fenton, Alex and others have mentioned its vast function list, so I'm glad you brought them up. It strikes me as funny that FM is fussy about converting their functions to lower case but yet have a broken layout in GTRR for, ahem, years; or that they have import dialogs which can't hold their settings. Ah, it just strikes me as funny but then I have a strange sense of humor. :smirk:

[comment]

Excel has a ton of functions - and a somewhat larger company behind it. It's too bad, IMHO, that Apple shows no interest in its wholly-owned subsidiary. I believe you would see a LOT of changes if Mr. Jobs wanted to showcase Filemaker in one of his keynote addresses.

BTW, I hate Excel functions being in all upper case - I think that Filemaker's UpperCamelCase makes them much more readable.

[Fenton]

Function coloring :-!

[LaRetta]

Ah, this simple girl just wants a truly ROUND radio button.

And you see, Michael? Fenton used ! in HIS post. Nuff said ... except ... function coloring? You want to color the calcs, Fenton? I'd really get into colors - I'd have templates of them. Text functions would be green, design functions blue ... oh what fun!

[LaRetta]

BTW, I started this post so I can go off topic if I wish. And I can ask multiple questions as well. I could even spit, curse and grab my crotch if I wanted to.

The devil is in me, I suppose.

[Lee Smith]

I don't recall ever hearing these two words before. Sheltered life, FileMaker forever...

Thanks to you and Colin, I learned something new today. So, you can't claim Bad here.

Lee

[LaRetta]

Ah dang, Lee ... can't grabbing my crotch count at least. I thought you'd bleep me! Okay, I'll remove it anyway - it was borderline for me and totally out of character which is why I did it.

Yeah, I liked whack and bang. It just sounds so ... techy-with-attitude. ROF!

[comment]

Ah, this simple girl just wants a truly ROUND radio button.

I hate doing this to you, but I would like (among a lot of other things) is the ability to create an interface like this:

http://kuler.adobe.com/

[LaRetta]

Interface? Remember I'm on Windows. It tells me I must close Firefox before it will run. So I close Firefox which closes the web page. DOH. I sign back on and all I get are color swatches. Tis true I got terribly excited about several of them and captured their color numbers of the sets. And I like the web page, particularly the mouseovers in 3D, expandable swatches, and ability to drag swatches to Favorites to save them (but it doesn't work with Firefox). It's late and I'm a bit fried ... is there more here I'm missing, Michael?

I DID find a forum about it and a question was asked, "Please help. I go to kuler.adobe.com, download Flash Player 9, says it downloads successfully, but cannot get past the black screen. I am a Windows XP user." Which is EXACTLY what I did and what happened. Nobody responded to help the person though ... bummer.

I would PAY SOMEONE to let me only play in UI particularly with colors and patterns and stuff; particularly if I could also play with icons.

[comment]

all I get are color swatches.

Perhaps you missed the point - it's a database. A database of color swatches, but still a database.

[comment]

BTW, when are you going to un-mothball your Mac?

[The Shadow]

I believe Shawn could add a few words here about how calcs are parsed, and why it wouldn't matter if the "code" could be shortened from "not" to "!").

I agree that logical operators would be better in all upper case. BTW, in Excel both AND and NOT are functions, and all function names use upper case only.

FileMaker doesn't store all the text you see, internally the calculation text is stored like:

  

(,2+....

When you want to see it, all the function names are converted into your localized versions, and the field names are reconstructed from the schema (which is why calculations and scripts don't require any editing when field names are changed, nothing cares about the names).

The calculation names to use are stored in the file FMStrs.dls, which on the Mac is in the app package at:

  FileMaker Pro Advanced.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/FMStrs.dls

This is a "FileMaker" file, so you can change the extension to ".fp7" and open it, but there weren't any layouts until you opened it, so it looks kinda weird. So, you can edit the entries for "And", "Or", "Not" to be all capitals, and that's the way you will see them from now on - this is the same as a german user opening any english-created file, all the function names will be shown as the german versions for them.

You can safely change the case of these since the case doesn't matter, but if you decide you would like to change "LeftWords" to "Bannana" some solutions will have trouble when they try to perform an Evaluate() using that function, so I wouldn't suggest that. :

Almost forgot: It doesn't appear you can change "Not" to "!" as well (I tried it), I suspect that the punctation rather than letter confuses the parser into taking the wrong path (I got an error that "! n" field was not found).

Edited January 23, 2008 by Guest

[Genx]

Michael,

I think you should come over the to the dark side, your talents are wasting away on FM.

Lol seriously, in the amount of time I used to spend whinging about FM in a month hoping someone would do something about it, I could now write that interface using a cup of HTML, 2 teaspoons of CSS, a dollop of AJAX and a sprinkle of PHP :

...I'm hungry

As a bonus you get round radio buttons and check box's with ticks instead of crosses... BUILT IN! Or if you don't like em, make your own Or if you want to change your layout, you just go change one or two files and voila.

And LaRetta, yes I also find it a little annoying that I can't just type !IsEmpty(something)... very very annoying... Okay I lie, I find it absolutely frustrating - MY FINGERS HAVE TO MOVE 3 WHOLE TIMES, and not is like a weird word anyway - i mean its all over the joint.

[Genx]

On a side note, really handy tool Michael.

[LaRetta]

BTW, when are you going to un-mothball your Mac?

It's sitting here on my newly constructed L-shaped office next to my Dell and laptop. It's beautiful and has the coolest background you've ever seen (by Digital Blasphemy, my idol). And it plays wonderful music; well, it did. Now the mouse and keyboard BOTH have dead batteries.

But the 24-wide is now small in comparison to what Mac has out! I hear they are up to 30" or something but I haven't checked recently. I miss watching the Mac ads (I adored them). But I haven't yet shipped my woofer and speakers for this Dell so it has no sound. I love my Mac though ... :blah:

[comment]

I think you should come over the to the dark side, your talents are wasting away on FM.

I am not sure what you mean here by "the dark side". If it's HTML/CSS/PHP etc. that's too much like real programming. I dabble in it here and there, but I believe these tools will someday mature into something anybody can use - kind of like ScripMaker.

MY FINGERS HAVE TO MOVE 3 WHOLE TIMES, and not is like a weird word anyway - i mean its all over the joint.

If you're that lazy, you could click on it and it will be inserted for you, including the surrounding spaces - saving you FIVE keyboard presses. An exclamation mark, OTOH, requires holding the Shift key, which I hate.

[Genx]

but I believe these tools will someday mature into something anybody can use - kind of like ScriptMaker.

Sure they might, and they do exist in various forms currently - take dreamweaver for instance - but the issue you run into there is that with any reliance on pattern and on a tool that attempts to predict what uses it will be put to, you tend to limit yourself in terms of what can be done.

If you're that lazy, you could click on it and it will be inserted for you, including the surrounding spaces - saving you FIVE keyboard presses. An exclamation mark, OTOH, requires holding the Shift key, which I hate.

Lol, that would mean that i'd have to remove my hands off the keyboard - shift is kind of just ingrained there, and its technically one key stroke... like A for example... Technically. Lol, to be honest its just a little annoying to look at, not for some reason lately seems more ambiguous than !. Edited January 23, 2008 by Guest

[Colin Keefe]

Function coloring :-!

Kind of off topic (what was the topic again?), but I would love to see some basic function/variable coloring in the Calculation Dialog. It can't be that hard, can it? Even the most basic HTML editors can do it.

[The Shadow]

Here's the resource file with NOT, AND, OR, XOR as all uppercase.

Find the FMStrs.dls file in your FileMaker 9 install (either Mac or Windows), and replace it with this one (after saving a copy of the original) and your calculations will always show the logical operators as uppercase.

FMStrs.dls.zip

[LaRetta]

I can't believe you did this for me, Shawn! Thank you very much! Do you think its a bad habit to get into? Well, I don't care; I type everything I do anyway (even if double-clicking seems quicker, it isn't for me). I type 110 wpm no errors on all numbers and symbols so I don't even like reaching for my mouse to click something. I also like forcing myself to know syntax and parenth without fudging.

All caps seems like a small thing but, well, sometimes small things can matter. IIRC, the first time I saw operators referenced as caps was from you and it stuck way back then. :wink2:

[Colin Keefe]

Opening that up in FileMaker's a real eye-opener. Enough for me to poke into your resume and find out that we ALL owe you thanks for List() and GetLayoutObjectAttribute().

Thank you!

Colin

[The Shadow]

You're welcome, thanks for noticing.

When we were making FileMaker 7 we needed to store the program's string resources differently - they needed to stored as unicode, and preferably cross-platform. Needless to say, once we figured out the correct, elegant solution we almost felt silly that previous versions of FileMaker had ever used anything else.

LaRetta, I don't think there's any bad habit here, the case of the functions don't matter to the calculations (they don't even remember it, as we've discussed above), all that has changed is the preferred way to show the function - that should be completely harmless.

[mr_vodka]

This is pretty neat Shawn. -)

BTW for those that are looking for it on a PC, for at least english users its at:

C:Program FilesFileMakerFileMaker Pro 9 AdvancedExtensionsEnglish