On the other hand, there are times you want to work with temporary lists, data snapshots, clipboard contents, and so on.

It turns out there are some useful techniques for dealing with data of this type.

You probably know about FileMaker global variables, and global fields.

Did you know you can create list views and portals from a global variable?

Did you know you can sort, find, filter, export, and print the contents of a global variable?

You can create an in-memory database of thousands or tens of thousands of records by passing data to a global variable, and then connect it to an index list. You can  then create methods to view and report on this data.

For an example of this technique, begin here:

http://concise-design.com/downloads/memorydb.zip

A variety of sources are set up for demonstration purposes. You can view an example contact list, an example city/state/zip list, a file list, etc. Mac users can instantly display the results of a hard drive search for FileMaker, Excel, or Word files.

When viewing this data no data is ever imported.

The only data contained in this file is the number set from 1 to 3500 (the data size set for this example).

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Bruce Robertson
Concise Design
FileMaker 9 Certified