Filtered Value Lists, with “All” Option | A Filemaker Miscellany

A nice little value list trick here.

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Filtered value lists are great, and very useful when it comes to improving the user interface.  In this food-based example, we have 2 tables, “Courses” and “Items”.  Food Items belong to a Course (e.g. Soup is a Starter, Steak is a Main course, Trifle is a Desert, etc.).

rel_vl1rel_vl2So when the user selects a Course, the Items menu (pop-up) displays all Items belonging to that Course.

This is achieved by a global field, COURSEID, with a relationship from this field to the course_id field in the Items table.  We then have a value list defined as follows, i.e. including only related values in Items from the context of the Globals table.  Standard stuff, well documented elsewhere, and it works fine, as long as the user has selected a Course.

rel_vl4

But we often have to deal with exceptions.  What if, for example, we have Items which don’t belong to a course (such as coffee or canapes)?  Or we want to allow the user to skip the Course selection and go straight to the Items list, where s/he expects to see a list of ALL items available?

Well, there are probably many ways to achieve this, but I’ve found it quite difficult to make it really user-friendly.  For instance, one book I read recently suggested having separate pop-up menu for “All Items”, using a value list based on a cartesian join, which would obviously work, but strikes me as potentially confusing to the users, sending them to 2 different places to make the same selection.

 

Filtered Value Lists, with “All” Option | A Filemaker Miscellany.

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