Tag: JSONMakeArray

JSON, Level: Advanced, Version: FM 26 or later, Virtual List

FM 26: Virtual List with Window UUIDs

Kevin Frank

[Some of the content in today’s article has been recycled from earlier articles.]

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Demo file: virtual-list-with-window-uuids.zip (requires FM 26 or later)

Introduction

As the whole world — or the whole FileMaker world at any rate — knows by now, last week saw the release of FileMaker 2026 with a number of compelling new features, as well as improvements to existing features. And almost immediately an abundance of well-written, insightful articles appeared, blossoming like a field of springtime flowers to serve as trusty guides, including…

By contrast in this article we’re going to focus on one new feature, and its relevance to the phenomenon known as virtual list. To quote from the FM 26 release notes:

The Select Window, Close Window, Move/Resize Window, and Set Window Title script steps now support selecting a window by UUID, making it possible to uniquely identify a window even if multiple windows have the same name or if the window’s name has changed. You can use the new Get(WindowUUID) function to get the UUID of the currently active window.

Continue reading “FM 26: Virtual List with Window UUIDs” →

ExecuteSQL, JSON, Level: Any, SQL, Virtual List

October 2025 Full Access Resource Page

Kevin Frank

Here are links to articles and resources related to presentations/discussions I will be participating in at the [Full Access] un-conference Oct 20-23, 2025.

JSON Demo Files

JSON Articles

JSONQuery

Virtual List Demo Files

Virtual List Articles

SQL Articles

JSON, Level: Advanced, Version: FM 21 or later

JSON Optimization in FM 21

Kevin Frank

Introduction

If you work with large JSON structures in FileMaker, you may be aware that the current shipping version of the product (FileMaker Pro 21, a.k.a. FileMaker Pro 2024) has a single-element JSON cache, which is reset whenever JSONSetElement or JSONGetElement is called, and that you can boost performance by taking this into account.

Six months ago Josh Halpern was kind enough draw my attention to this in a comment on one of my articles, and added…

“If you’re interested, I wrote a couple more points about how the JSON cache behaves here: https://the.fmsoup.org/t/performance-core-principles-10-scripting/1867/25?u=jwilling. But the gist is… only touch one json at a time.”

[The above is required reading as far as I’m concerned, and has changed the way I work with JSON.]

More recently I was discussing JSON caching with Steve Senft-Herrera, and he shared a couple additional optimization ideas that had not occurred to me, and that I am definitely adding to my tool kit. (Thank you Steve.)

At any rate, today we’re going to take a look at applying all three of these ideas to speed up processing of large JSON structures within a While statement, and you can follow along in today’s demo file if you are so inclined.

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Demo file: fm-21-json-optimization.zip  (requires FM 21 or later)
Continue reading “JSON Optimization in FM 21” →

JSON, Level: Advanced, Version: FM 16 or later

Fast Summaries to JSON

Kevin Frank

The other day some colleagues were discussing a need to produce a JSON representation of the data in a summary report. Long time readers of this blog will know that I am obsessed with fond of the Fast Summary technique, and it seemed like it might be a good fit for this challenge, so I built some demos to find out if that would be the case.

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Demos 1 and 4 will work with FM 16 or later. Demos 2 & 3 utilize recently-added JSON features, so require FM 21 or later.

Continue reading “Fast Summaries to JSON” →