Soliant Consulting : Clients - Success Story

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Create a robust interface exemplary of commercially available software.

All FileMaker Applications solutions feature custom graphics, bi-directional portal sorting, dynamically filtered portals, pop-up windows, related value pickers, calendar pickers, and a range of rich objects to provide users with a complete solution right out-of-the-box.

Portal sorting is accomplished by storing the column and direction that each portal is to be sorted by in global fields. Those setting fields are then used by the calculation sorting fields that are specified in portal setup. When the user clicks on a portal header, the global values are changed, the calculated sorting fields update, and the portal resorts. Descending portal sorting uses native FileMaker descending functions: the first field specified in portal setup for sorting (set to ascending) is simply set to "1" (one) when descending sorting is needed this causes the first sort field to be effectively be ignored, and the portal sorts by the second specified field, which is set to descending. Enter layout mode and double click any portal, then choose "Sort Portal Records (Specify)" to see how this is set up.

Companies portal sorted in descending order

The calendar picker, and many of the popup windows, demonstrate the idea of borrowing object oriented concepts in FileMaker Pro, in that they generally provides encapsulated functionality that is easily reused by a number of other routines. The calendar picker (all the layouts, scripts, and data objects associated with it) has a single purpose in life, to retrieve a date. Any script that requires a date input from a user simply calls the main calendar script and waits for the user to complete the action. Once the user is done, the calling script checks to see if they chose a date and does whatever else it needs to do. The script for fetching a date may never consider what that date will be used for, and the scripts that require dates must always get that date by asking for it through the main calendar script. This is the essence of the OOP concept of "encapsulation".

Provide a dynamic, flexible report-builder allowing users to define their own reports.

The Soliant team began by providing a range of flexible layouts that accept different sort orders (triggering differing sub-summary behaviors in some cases) and then extended the stored-find capabilities of the system to allow users to define canned reports as needed.

The key to user defined Find requests for the report manager lies in the storage of Find criteria as record data. The Finds that are created by the popup Find screens are accessible from the report manager (in fact they can be created there as well), and are executed procedurally when the report runs. In addition, multiple stored finds can be specified for a report, this allows the user to take advantage of the "Replace/Constrain/Extend" find options in FileMaker to perform sophisticated searches. Careful inspection of the Report and Find scripts reveals a group of small routines that are designed for maximum reuse and minimum maintenance overhead.

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