Value Lists at PDX FileMaker Meetup

It was great seeing many of you last night at the PDX FileMaker Meetup.

During part of the meeting, I shared a brief overview of Value Lists. We looked at all the related built-in functions and then showed a few script patterns (idioms) that utilize lists in scripts.

There was some great feedback relating to performance, empty lines, repetitions, and case sensitivity.

Here is also wishing that FileMaker might someday support wraparound capabilities to do handy things like

GetValue ( $my_list ; -1 )

As promised, here is the demo file for download: ValueListDemo.zip. I incorporated some of your questions and also added a couple performance tests. Based on the feedback and test results, I’m revising my item checking idiom to look like

If [ValueCount ( FilterValues ( $straw ; $haystack ) )]

Chris Irvine is a custom solution developer and consultant at Threeprong.com LLC.