if agument returning unexpected TRUE

[MaxB.]

The calculation:

$$category = "11491961930" or "11491971250" or "11491971250" or "47995855093" or "47995855093"

is giving me a TRUE no matter what $$category is. I have no idea what triggered this happening since it used to work properly. I tracked $$category in the debugger and it has $$category as a text string containing no numbers in my test cases so I don't know how it would be matching that to trigger the IF statement.

Edited August 16, 2015 by MaxB.

[bcooney]

You cannot write a string of "or" statements. Also, do you really need a $$var? If the var only needs to exist for the life of the script, then use $var.

Hopefully, someone will have a more elegant calc than this, but:

If ( $category = "11491961930" or $category = "11491971250" ) 

 

[eos]

You cannot use that syntax in FileMaker; only the first sub-expression tests $$category, the others are stand-alone that are all True, since it there is a number in that string and GetAsBoolean() returns True. So if any of them is True, the entire expression is.

Instead, try

$$category = "11491961930" or 
$$category = "11491971250" or 
$$category = "11491971250" or 
$$category = "47995855093" or 
$$category = "47995855093"

(which is a bit verbose), or

Let (
  checkList = List ( "11491961930" ; "11491971250" ; "11491971250" ; "47995855093" ; "47995855093" ) ;
  not IsEmpty ( FilterValues ( $$category ; checkList ) ) 
)

which looks better the longer your list is, and is the best way to check for membership in a non-literal list (one you generate dynamically).

And heed what Barbara (hi there! ) said about using $$vars.

Edited August 16, 2015 by eos

[bcooney]

Ah, I was hoping you'd chime in with something more elegant!

[eos]

Sometimes it's “Publish and Perish" … 

[MaxB.]

Well now I have no idea how this code was "working as intended" before now. This is super old and poorly documented, I don't even know where the numbers in the comparison are coming from. I do know the $$ is being used to pass the var between scripts though. I could change it to a global field probably if using $$ is such a faux-pas.

Edited August 16, 2015 by Lee Smith
duplicate, looks like the fmforums hickup

[comment]

Well now I have no idea how this code was "working as intended" before now.

It wasn't.

This is super old

Well, not super old, since variables are a "new feature" of version 7 - just slightly over 11 years ago. Time considerations aside, version 7 was the last revolutionary upgrade. For those of us that started in prior versions, variables are still new, as are the other changes introduced then and since then.

I could change it to a global field probably if using $$ is such a faux-pas.

We cannot tell if it is a faux-pas or not without seeing how exactly it is used. Certainly, if you need a variable to persist after the script has run, then it needs to be a global variable. And replacing it with a global field is not likely to serve any purpose other than bloat your schema. But if the purpose is to pass the value to another script, then consider using a script parameter instead. Unlike a global variable, it doesn't hang around after all the scripts have run out.

 

 

Edited August 16, 2015 by comment