FileMaker® Pro Design & Scripting For Dummies®

Chapter 3. Calculation Programming: You Have the Power!

In This Chapter

• What is the Calculation Editor?

• Using operators and Boolean logic

• Putting calculations in fields

• Using calculations in scripts

• Formatting text with calculations

I can think of lots of reasons for using calculations in your FileMaker database application. Maybe you need an application that automatically adds up the hours of work that you have performed for a customer and then calculates how much to charge your customer for that work. Or you might need to use a comparison calculation to determine how many of your customers have ordered products during the past three months. When examining the power of scripts and calculations within FileMaker, you start to realize that FileMaker is not just for storing data. The real power of FileMaker is in its ability to manage, manipulate, and provide information about the data — which requires performing calculations on the data.

In this chapter, you find out how to tap into this powerful feature. After a quick introduction to the Calculation Editor, I explain how you can decide where to place calculations — in the database or in a script. You also discover the basics of working with ScriptMaker. In addition to walking you through the basic steps, I walk you through several examples to whet your appetite and get you well on your way to creating calculations and scripts of your own.

Introducing the Calculation Editor

When I was in high school, I took an algebra class. Fortunately, I ...