ISO FileMaker Magazine

With many native features in Claris/FileMaker, you may end up hitting what you "think" is a brick wall. In this case, I'm referring to the ability of sorting portals. You've only got one checkbox per portal with the options for specifying a selection of fields to sort by. True, you can choose a number of fields to sort by, but, you can't change their order dynamically or allow a user to make any changes to which fields are used.

That is, of course, unless you combine a variety of native features which will allow you to accomplish your desired results for sorting portals. In this video, we take a look at a wonderfully great technique for being able to sort any given portal on any number of fields in either direction and being the masters of our own portal sorting destiny. Need to allow end users to sort portals for maximum effect? Go no further than watching this video and using the provided technique file.

What makes FileMaker development so fun is the variety of different functions and script steps. They provide an almost infinite number of combinations to solve a wide variety of technical problems. There isn't always just "one way to do it". So, what happens when you stop to think about a more recent feature in light of how you've "always done it before"? Like... sorting... for example.

Have you always simply attached the Sort script step to your list view headers and called it a day? What if you could use just two simple scripts to provide single field sorting solution wide? This seems pretty cool since you can manage the sorting of all list views and be able to quickly add this feature to any given layout. Reusable code is a great thing.

That's exactly what this video is all about. Taking advantage of lesser known features in order to create technical solutions which provide a high degree of leverage. Let's learn how to sort any field with just two simple scripts!

Solving real world problems within FileMaker can actually be quite fun. It's a certain type of challenge which includes making something fast, efficient and easy to maintain. It's the type of thing which keeps us developers and learners going.

Like most all software products, which allow for a high degree of creativity, it boils down to knowing the feature set and what's possible. When you learn the underpinnings, and you can really wrap your head around what the limitations or consequences are, you can often come up with really creative data solutions.

In this video, I provide a solution to a problem which I had long forgotten about and previously solved. Yet, there it was, the same problem needing to be solved. The issue is related to sequencing a list of values so they sort in a specific order. When the order of values can be arbitrary and up to the user, you want to facilitate the sorting ability as easily as possible. When you try to solve this problem, you come across various issues related to how you chose to implement the UI portion.

So, with this video, I present to you the underpinnings of how I go about solving these types of problems by understanding how you can manipulate data within FileMaker. Sit back and relax as we take a look at Optimized Sequence Sorting.

Web browsers and their primary language, Javascript, have a very robust ecosystem. In fact, there's few solutions you can't find out in the world of Javascript.

So, in FileMaker, when it comes to our data and its presentation within a user friendly fashion, we can easily create a layout, set it to list view and allow users to simply start using FileMaker.

But, wait, using FileMaker itself isn't always super user-friendly. In fact, you have to learn how to sort by multiple columns by actually heading into a dialog box. Which, admittedly, becomes easier to use, but it's not immediately UI friendly in that you can't just click on the column you want to sort. Let alone select a second or third column and have those sorts apply too.

Enter the world of the Web Viewer and Javascript and it's quite refreshing what you can do and in such a short time. This video walks you through the process of setting up a Javascript library called Datatables. It's a very powerful, and immediately usable UI for working with tabular data. While you can implement the same features within FileMaker itself, it takes quite a bit longer to do so.

Every software user loves convenience. Heck, every human being loves convenience. So, why not provide it within every aspect of your user interface?

The problem, however, which you may run across is figuring certain features out. FileMaker can be a very simple program or something quite complex if you're trying to do something custom like providing users with the ability to custom order their related records.

The most basic sequential ordering of data comes in the form of simply providing a number field called something like "order", "sequence" or the more mathematically inclined "delta". Once you have the field, you can allow the user to manually change the values. But, that becomes a real pain when you try to add a record between the numbers 1 and 2. You now have a user entering 1.5 or 1.3 and 1.7 in order to get values to sort properly. Then, having to manually reserialize all the original values is just an unnecessary pain.

Well, the best solution to this problem is to simply use the automation provided by FileMaker's powerful scripting engine. With a few scripts, a value list, and a bit of FileMaker know-how, we can provide a very quick-and-easy method of allowing users to custom order portal rows.