Steve Lane – författare

Maybe you know FileMaker, and you have used it for years, but need a quick reference, immediately accessible while not interrupting your work on screen. This is the only book on the market expressly focused on describing each calculation formula and how and when to use each! Filled with real-world, concrete examples, this book is an invaluable companion to readers working to develop solutions to their every day software problems. Contains hundreds of calculation functions, script steps, and operations that will appeal to every FileMaker user, new and old.

The calculation dialog in FileMaker serves as a fundamental element in nearly all development activities. The calculation dialog allows developers easy access to the data fields in their solutions and to a complete function list. This Short Cut presents a complete description of each calculation function, lists examples, and in many cases offers additional comments on usage.

This Short Cut is Chapter 6 from the book FileMaker 8 Functions and Scripts Desk Reference by Scott Love, Steve Lane, and Bob Bowers (0-7897-3511-3).  As such, it contains references pointing you to additional information not found in this Short Cut, but in a companion book, Special Edition Using FileMaker 8. Apart from this reference, the Short Cut is fully self-contained and is an excellent sampling of calculation functions.

This Short Cut presents a sampling of custom functions that we’ve found useful, or that serve as good examples of functions in our day-to-day practice. The functions are broken into groups according to their purpose, much as FileMaker’s calculation functions are. Please note that these functions are meant as examples—although the examples were not tested exhaustively, nor is this collection meant to be comprehensive. We hope you’ll find some of them helpful directly, or that reading and analyzing others might provide a springboard for your own ideas.

Table of Contents

Date Calculations

Text and Data Conversions

Email Tools

List Handlers

Developer Tools

System Constants

Toolkit for Complex Data Structures

    Data API Within FileMaker

    Data Tree

    Using XML as a Data Structure

    Path-Based Selections

    The Functions