Archive | October, 2011

Summary Report in a Filtered Portal

Posted on October 18, 2011 by

Have you ever wished there were an easy way to summarize the contents of one portal in another portal? Perhaps something along the lines of the “Summary” portal below?

I’ve touched on the possibility of using a portal to produce (or assist in the production of) an on-screen summary report a couple times in the past…

…but today we’re going to look at a fresh approach, and if you wish, you can follow along in today’s demo file, fm11-summary-report-in-a-portal, which uses a filtered portal and therefore requires FileMaker 11 or later. Continue Reading →

A Simple Backup Script

Posted on October 8, 2011 by

Update 25 June 2012: this article and demo file have been revised to work with both FM 12 and earlier versions. Please see A Simple Backup Script, revisited

Easy Sorting of List Views, part 3

Posted on October 1, 2011 by

Update 22 Jan 2013: Demo file and screen shots have been revised to fix bugs identified by Matt Ayres and David Schwartz (see comments at the end of article).

Ever since I posted part 2 of this series, I’ve been torn between, on the one hand, wanting to move on to other topics; and on the other, the realization that I wasn’t quite done with this one yet. So, here is what I expect will be my final posting, and final demo (dynamic list sorting, v3 rev5), on this subject.

Thus far, we’ve looked at various methods to facilitate dynamic list sorting (by “dynamic” I mean that the field to be sorted is determined programatically). Most of these methods use two fields — one of them uses four — and you can see them all in part 2.

But in the back of my mind has been the knowledge that Ugo DiLuca pulled this off with a single field back in 2004 (EasySort.fp7, shared by permission of the author, and previously discussed last April in an article entitled Portal Sorting, pt 3).

Continue Reading →