Comments on: Using Global Variables for List Selections

By: Daniel Antunes

Daniel Antunes — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 20:25:36 +0000

Dan,

We don’t have an example file available at the moment, but I will look into making one available for you this week to help make the process a little clearer.

By: Dan Neesley

Dan Neesley — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 12:47:29 +0000

Is there an example file available for Using Global Variables for List Selections?

I don’t quite see how to implement this…

By: Daniel Antunes

Daniel Antunes — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 03:36:55 +0000

Oreste,

Once you get your found set of records to display for the report, you should be able to loop through them to gather the applicable states. If you have more than one record per state, you can check for that value in the list and skip calling the AddOrRemoveFromList function for that particular record if the state is already in there. Once you finish looping through the records, sort them according to you sub summary settings and you’ve got yourself a list of all the states in the report.

By: Oreste Schiavone

Oreste Schiavone — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 21:58:34 +0000

Is there a way to get the list of values in a sub summary report? For instance I sub summarize by states. I want to get a list of all the states.

By: Miki

Miki — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 21:54:27 +0000

Daniel,

I really had to think about what you were saying in this post and I didn’t fully grok it until I set up a little demo. Whoa, how simple and elegant!

I was recently at one of the TechNet web seminars and one of the presenters (I wish I remembered who) said that it will take some time to wrap our brains around the idea of using list view again. I seem to have been buried and blinded by building portals for nearly everything. Now, my selection portal needn’t be a portal at all. Just a simple list, ha!

Thanks,
Miki

By: BillP

BillP — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 17:45:28 +0000

Last year I used a similar approach for a client who needed to select multiple classes for their student registration process without lengthy process of adding each classes one at a time. I used a secondary modal window with available classes listed in a “selector portal.” Each portal row click activated a script to auto-entered (or removed if existed) a unique value in a $$classesSelected global variable. I used a similar custom function to Add/Delete values. Conditional formatting was used to hilite selected portal rows based on matching values in $$classesSelected. Validation prevented selection of an existing class registration. A Save button accepted the list of hilited classes and continued the parent script. A looping routine then created class registration records for the student using the values in $$classesSelected. The visual feedback provided the client with a quick, easy to understand method of choosing classes.

Empty global variables seem to disappear in the FileMaker Advanced Data Viewer list of current variables. Declaring an empty or null global value via script step seems to help with globals housekeeping.