Bit Based Checkboxes

by Matt Petrowsky

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FileMaker, for all it's ease-of-use, does things in a particular way to make things easy - on purpose. Checkboxes are a prime example. When searching for information within a database, people typically search based on what they understand. The word "Customer" or "Vendor" makes sense, because that's the term you use.

However, there are times when storing things in a more optimized fashion is desirable. This is especially the case when you wish to disassociate the value displayed with what is stored in the database.

Since FileMaker will store the string value "Customer" within a field, when you decide to split customers into "Prospects" and "Customers" you'll need to do some data manipulation to break things out. Unless, you've used ID values or some other type of abstraction from the value shown vs. what is stored.

In this video, I present how you can use Bit based math in order to store the values of a check box (or any other number of items within a logical group). This works especially well when you want to emulate the OS native check boxes in the current versions of FileMaker.