There are times when the full rigor of FileMaker's structured data methods are exactly what you need.

On the other hand, there are times you want to work with temporary lists, data snapshots, clipboard contents, and so on.

It turns out there are some useful techniques for dealing with data of this type.

You probably know about FileMaker global variables, and global fields.

Did you know you can create list views and portals from a global variable?

Did you know you can sort, find, filter, export, and print the contents of a global variable?

You can create an in-memory database of thousands or tens of thousands of records by passing data to a global variable, and then connect it to an index list. You can then create methods to view and report on this data.

A variety of sources are set up for demonstration purposes. You can view an example contact list, an example city/state/zip list, a file list, etc. Mac users can instantly display the results of a hard drive search for FileMaker, Excel, or Word files.

When viewing this data no data is ever imported.

The only data contained in this file is the number set from 1 to 3500 (the data size set for this example).

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Bruce Robertson

Concise Design

FileMaker 9 Certified

memorydb.zip

Bruce, that is simply brilliant! : I had stumbled on something similar, - your approach is very compelling, now need to find the right project so I can implement it too, thanks for sharing.

Thanks! This technique has an enormous range of applications for reporting, value lists, selector portals, all kinds of things.

HI Bruce,

That is awesome! I have been working on some things to move some of my field based calculations into memory through global variables in the hope that it would speed things up. But this has blown me away!

I can see that if you can get your head around this it extends filemaker into a whole new direction.

All the best and thanks for sharing this concept.

Regards,

Lance

This is really interesting. I'm still wrapping my head around the concept and its applications, but do you think that it could possibly be used to speed up auto-complete or pull-down lists with many values?

This is really interesting. I'm still wrapping my head around the concept and its applications, but do you think that it could possibly be used to speed up auto-complete or pull-down lists with many values?

Give it a try! But no, I don't think it will make much difference there. I think the flexibility is the primary value of this technique.

IS your example available in Windows XP SP2 format??? :

IS your example available in Windows XP SP2 format??? :

There is no such thing.

It is a Filemaker file. Platform and version do not matter.