FILEMAKER: Sorting Portal Via A Calculation Field

From Dwayne Wright - www.dwaynewright.com

One thing you can do is have your portal sorted by a calculation field. The basics are that you set the portal for sorting just like we showed you before. The field that the portal is sorted by is a calculation field. This calculation can be dynamic, which is to say that it can use get or design functions and sort dynamically based upon database conditions.

Another popular option is to sort a portal by what a user selects in a global field that in turn sorts the field based upon a CASE calculation function in a calculation field. This tends to look something like

Case(
Global Filter Field = “Sort Name”, “Name”,
Global Filter Field = “Sort Zip”, “Zip”,
Global Filter Field = “Sort Phone”, “Phone”,
Global Filter Field = “Do Not Sort”, “”, “”)

The advantage of global fields as the switch in the calculation is that the global data will remain the same as you go from record to record and is the staple of most portal sorting routines. Also in a multiple user / networked setting, global data is unique to each user once it has be modified.

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© 2007 - Dwayne Wright - dwaynewright.com

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