Brain Teaser
I was working on a crosstab report to show grade distributions and I wanted alternating highlights. I was using Mikhai Edoshin’s snazzy technique (http://edoshin.skeletonkey.com/2006/12/crosstab_report.html),
which meant that each row was a subsummary part, which, at least in my copy of FileMaker, doesn’t support alternating fill. Like an idiot, I threw in a conditional format
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EDIT: This post got hosed somehow, and everything beyond the part where I refer to myself as an idiot was erased. I can’t remember what was idiotic about my original conditional formatting in this case (if I weren’t such an idiot, I’d probably remember). In any case, below is a reprise of the brain teaser:
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Each line in Edoshin’s crosstab technique is basically a repeating summary field based on a repeating summary calc. My goal was to get each one of these repeating fields to alternate its background fill. Using any kind of Mod-based calculation based on record number was going to fail, since these fields are on a subsummary, and there’s no way to predict how many records correspond to each subsummary part.
Taking a purely throw-rocks-at-it-until-it-stops-moving approach, I opened up the conditional formatting dialog on that repeating summary field, and hammered out a calculation. I was astounded, when I went back to preview mode, to see this:
My conditional formatting calc had inadvertently produced a checkerboard pattern. I realized, shortly thereafter, that by placing the same calc on a regular field, rather than a repeating field, I could get the alternating pattern as I desired:
The brain teaser challenge, before it got erased, was to figure out what sort of calculation could yield this effect on a subsummary part. The reward, if I recall correctly, was a signed copy of my memoir.