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Tuesday, January 4, 2011 at 10:07AM 
Recently, I worked on a digital asset management (DAM) experiment with FileMaker Pro. The idea was to have the ability for the database to create portfolio folders of images via an export routine. I used the demo version of the Troi File plug-in for the experiment. Here is a link to the YouTube video (click here)
Tuesday, April 27, 2010 at 09:18AM From Dwayne Wright PMP
Certified FileMaker 10, 9 & 8 Developer
WEB: www.dwaynewright.com
EMAIL: info@dwaynewright.com
TWITTER: dwaynewright
YOUTUBE: FileMakerThoughts
From what I can tell, the FileMaker Report Assistant has been upgraded with the following changes and I’m listing these in (what I determine) their order of importance. This isn’t the order in which they appear in the assistant workflow.
- Run Script Automatically Checkbox
- Specify Summary Fields On The Fly
- Updated Preview Area
- New Manage Layouts Dialog (different way to start reports)
RUN SCRIPT AUTOMATICALLY
This innocent looking checkbox in the last pane of the assistant is quite handy. What it will do is tag the layout automatically with the OnLayoutEnter script trigger to run the script you created for the report!
SPECIFY SUMMARY FIELDS ON THE FLY
It used to be that if you were using the report assistant and you realized that you needed to create a summary field (for subsummary or grand totals), you had to quit out of the assistant. This is no longer the case because you can now create new fields on the fly.
UPDATED PREVIEW AREA
When you are choosing options for your reports, a preview of what the report may look like appears off to the right hand side. List and columnar options are on the same choice screen and that is a nice tweak.
The new report assistant preview.
The previous report preview examples.
NEW MANAGE LAYOUTS DIALOG
This is another way to start a layout and a new layout can be a report. So this is a pretty subtle change.
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More info about the author and FileMaker in general, contact me at info@dwaynewright.com.
© 2010 - Dwayne Wright - dwaynewright.com
The material on this document is offered AS IS. There is NO REPRESENTATION OR WARRANTY, expressed or implied, nor does any other contributor to this document. WARRANTIES OF MERCHANT ABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE EXPRESSLY DISCLAIMED. Consequential and incidental damages are expressly excluded. FileMaker Pro is the registered trademark of FileMaker Inc.
Friday, November 20, 2009 at 08:32PM From Dwayne Wright - Certified FileMaker 10 Developer
WEB: www.dwaynewright.com
EMAIL: info@dwaynewright.com
TWITTER: dwaynewright
YOUTUBE: FileMakerThoughts
APPENDIX 2: From Around The Internet
Wanted to link to this post from Anvil Dataworks about sub-summary exports to Excel. I’ve had clients request this a number of times and I always meant to write a posting about it. Now I don’t have to! Here is the link ...
http://anvildataworks.com/blog/?p=234
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More info about the author and FileMaker in general, contact me at info@dwaynewright.com.
© 2009 - Dwayne Wright - dwaynewright.com
The material on this document is offered AS IS. There is NO REPRESENTATION OR WARRANTY, expressed or implied, nor does any other contributor to this document. WARRANTIES OF MERCHANT ABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE EXPRESSLY DISCLAIMED. Consequential and incidental damages are expressly excluded. FileMaker Pro is the registered trademark of FileMaker Inc.
Monday, November 2, 2009 at 10:04AM From Dwayne Wright - Certified FileMaker 10 Developer
WEB: www.dwaynewright.com
EMAIL: info@dwaynewright.com
TWITTER: dwaynewright
APPENDIX 2: From Around The Internet
An excellent blog post comes to us from FileMaker Louisville that explains a real life development situation where the largely unused “Weighted Average” checkbox comes into play from the Options For Summary Field dialog box. Check it out at ...
http://filemakerlouisville.posterous.com/averaging-the-averages
© 2010 - Dwayne Wright - dwaynewright.com
The material on this document is offered AS IS. FileMaker Pro is the registered trademark of FileMaker Inc.
Friday, April 17, 2009 at 12:48PM From Dwayne Wright - Certified FileMaker 9 Developer
WEB: www.dwaynewright.com
EMAIL: info@dwaynewright.com
TWITTER: dwaynewright
Had a client that calls me from time to time to chat about different ways to accomplish his goals for his database project. He called me today and I didn’t have a good answer for him but to commiserate with him that FileMaker didn’t have a pure checkbox option for this. I have seen some very heavy tweaks for this need in the past and have avoided them myself. I also have seen some innovative script trigger design in the last few weeks that ... take what used to be an intensive hack ... and boil it down to quite useable and transparent to the user.
I'm so freakishly busy with client work right now and just do not have the time to research the topic properly. I thought I'd toss this thought out into the blogosphere and see what might come back.
The main challenge is a classic one, what is the best way to strategically place sub summary part data breaks based upon the amount of space left on the printed page? If the number of rows that fit into a subsummary part extend to a second page, how do you present that condition to the user printing the report?
Said that I haven't seen anything simple. With FileMaker 10, I imagine there may be a way to do this due to the dynamic reporting feature. Perhaps some field that can detect how much row data you have, detect where a new subsummary part would like occur and then expand the number of carriage returns to accommodate that a subsummary data set would break across a page.
Better yet, have the calculation detect this and create a new subsummary part for the ongoing pages ... which would likely require that records falling into the secondary subsummary part would have the key sort data updated via a replace command (so it would fall nicely into our report needs). This way you would have a fresh subsummary part that would indicate it is from a second page and show the overall subsummary totals and the new “just on this page) summary totals.
If you have any ideas, comments or appropriate links to where we can solve this age old problem, we would love to hear from you!
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More info about the author and FileMaker in general, contact me at info@dwaynewright.com.
© 2009 - Dwayne Wright - dwaynewright.com
The material on this document is offered AS IS. There is NO REPRESENTATION OR WARRANTY, expressed or implied, nor does any other contributor to this document. WARRANTIES OF MERCHANT ABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE EXPRESSLY DISCLAIMED. Consequential and incidental damages are expressly excluded. FileMaker Pro is the registered trademark of FileMaker Inc.