What is the purpose for the _c_CommonOne constant fields?

Marvin wrote:What is the purpose for the _c_CommonOne constant fields?

Hi Marvin,

We use these for all kinds of things. The most common use is to easily show all the records from a given table in a portal. We use it this way to show all the user records in the calendar on the users tab of the about screen.

Another use is to have something boolean at the end of a relationship. For instance, on the daily view of our calendar we show a small blue dot if a given appointment has notes (a description) attached to it. We do this using a relationship that is only true for records that have a description and at the end of the relationship we show the Common_One field. FileMaker's number formatting lets us show "non zeros" as almost anything we want-- in this case a blue colored "•" to represent the note. (By the way, while you can certainly do this by creating a calc in the appointments' record, this use-a-related-1 method doesn't require any new calcs.)

Finally we'll often use CommonOne as part of the "left side" of a relationship that is matching on something boolean like "active". So when we show all "active" projects in a portal we may have CommonOne on one side and the number 1 indicating "activeness" on the other.

Hope that helps.

John