FILEMAKER: Portal Sorting (but not really) Using Tabs

From Dwayne Wright - Certified FileMaker 9 Developer
WEB: www.dwaynewright.com
EMAIL: info@dwaynewright.com
TWITTER: dwaynewright

CHAPTER 02: Portal Sorting

So I came across a client database that had a rather odd way of sorting a portal. The portal was located in a products table and was designed to show sales history. The columns in the portal were order id, date, company, quantity and order status. The portal had buttons to sort the row by date, company and qty. The customer wanted to add the ability to sort by order status.


The default sort for the portal was by the sales order date and the company on the sales order. The buttons on the three sort options were all tied to Go To Object script steps. This was very odd to me and I needed to research this technique. The buttons themselves were broken down into ...

DATE COLUMN BUTTON
Let( $$date = Choose( $$date; 1; 0);
Choose( $$date; "Date"; "Date D")
)

COMPANY COLUMN BUTTON
Let( $$company = Choose( $$company; 1; 0);
Choose( $$company; "Company"; "Company D")
)

QTY COLUMN BUTTON
Let( $$qty = Choose( $$qty; 1; 0);
Choose( $$qty; "Total"; "Total D")
)

Looking at the sort fields themselves, nothing remarkable. The company field was a placebo calculation field that was equal to related company name on the sales order. The date field was a lookup field from the sales order. I didn't see any hidden tabs but I thought I'd investigate. Sure enough, the darn thing is a layered hidden tab configuration. The tab have the same portal but with a different default sort order and the sort buttons do not sort but simply go to the correct tab with the corresponding default sort order portal.

This required me to take a closer look at the calculations that drive the Go To Object and I'm certainly glad I did. What the developer is doing is doing is toggling between an ascending sort for the portal and a descending sort. I don't use the Let or Choose function that often and this is a marvelous way to use them. So I went ahead and deconstructed the tabs and add a couple tabs of my own for the status sort. One tab to hold the portal for the ascending sort and one for the descending sort.

Needed to add a placebo order status field in the sales order line item table. This is because the portal is linked to the sales order line items and the status is linked to the order itself. I added my own sort button for status and attached my revised version of the Go To Object step ...

Let( $$status = Choose( $$status; 1; 0);
Choose( $$status; "Status"; "Status D")
)

I then wired everything back up and it worked like a charm!
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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.

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FILEMAKER: Constant Relationship Portals And Tab Panels

From Dwayne Wright - Certified FileMaker 9 Developer
WEB: www.dwaynewright.com
EMAIL: info@dwaynewright.com
TWITTER: dwaynewright

CHAPTER 09: Tricks and Techniques

This article is a piece of a larger collection of articles on a proof of concept file I'm doing with the 360Works email plug-in. I'll include some links below for the other articles. As I was building this part of the example file, I knew I'd be doing some portal work that some folks might not have seen before. So I thought I'd document it here in the FileMaker Portals Explored Blog. Here are the previous links ...

External Functions Registering Your Plug-in
A Friday Afternoon With The 360Works Email Plug-In

In my proof of concept file, I'm going to have a tab panels called "Emails By Account" and then have a sub-tab panel within it for the accounting, sales, support, management and information tech related emails. Within each of these tab panels will be a portal showing just those emails that account that have a status of unread.



So first we are going to create relationships that match with our possible account options listed above. So we will create some calculate global fields for the parent matching key fields for our dashboard. Then we will set up the relationships for each account, using the Anchor / Buoy design method.

Here you can see the primary match fields that I'll be using in the relationships.

Here you can see the anchor/buoy relationship graph design to allow me to setup a portal per account that is viewed via a tab panel.

Next we take our portal that we defined for the Emails (all) tab, copy it, paste it off to the side and shrink it just a little bit to fit into our Emails (by account) sub-tab. We also do not need the To Account field in the nested portal because those portals only show the emails for that account.

Here you can see the Emails All tab.

Here you can see the Emails By Account Tab, the nested tab panel within it, the chosen Accounting tab selected and the portal within it.

I decided that I would put a tooltip in place so you can see the to address on the email, just to be sure it is too the correct account.

Here you can see the portal is showing you that an email was sent to multiple addresses but was included in the tab for this account.
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More info about the author and FileMaker in general, contact me at info@dwaynewright.com.

© 2008 - 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.