Six Fried Rice Methodology Part 2 – Anchor Buoy and Data Structures

In the last post about the Six Fried Rice methodology I went over the concept of data separation and why we use it.  That is essentially the starting point for how we structure the files of our system.  One file contains all of the UI components and scripts for the system while a second file contains all of the actual data.  Just doing that one basic separation provides several benefits that generally make life easier, but how we structure the data within the Base File itself is equally if not more important than the data separation.

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Using Global Variables for List Selections

A funny thing happened while I was stumped over the question of how to allow one of our clients to select and deselect multiple items in a list.  Multiple people would be using the list at the same time.  I was struck by the fact that I’ve been making something more complicated than it needs to be for as long as I’ve been working with Filemaker.  After toying with various methods which included adding fields to the records in the list, join tables, global fields and horribly convoluted scripting it occurred to me that you can actually write a relatively simple custom function to handle it all.  It will add or subtract a value from a list that is stored in a global variable and then simply do some conditional formatting to highlight the selected items in the list.  No additional fields or scripting are needed, the global variable is session specific and once you are done you’ve got your list of data ready to go as is.

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