Ultimate Value List Control

[FileMaker Magazine]

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By Matt Petrowsky

People like to have things their own preferred way. Wasn't there some slogan for 40 years somewhere that said "Have it your way."? If people - developers in particular - can control the output, then life is good.

Within FileMaker, value lists are one of those areas where you may feel like you simply don't have the amount of control you should have. It's neither obvious nor inherently possible to control the order in which values are presented in anything other than an explicit value list. You know, the one where you type in the literal values.

The problem is, most value lists are not static. They're typically coming from the data within your solution. It's either all values from a given field or related values through a relationship.

FileMaker only provides you with one type of output, an ascending sorted value list according to the index of the field.

You can't programmatically add to it, nor can you subtract from it. You also can't control the sort order. At least not intuitively!

In this video, I show you a simple solution which provides all of the functionality missing above. You can combine both dynamic and static values and you can also control the order in which they are presented. Need more control over your value lists? This video and technique file will provide the answers!

Tags: 

• Value Lists

External links

User-based Value Lists Interdependent Value Lists

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