Flurry of Features

I know I declared a Glom beta, so the features should be frozen, but I just couldn’t help it. I’m working on a Film Production management system, to put Glom through its paces, and hopefully to sell. I needed these new features:

  • Multiple levels of sorting on reports.
  • Vertical report groups: Rows of field values inside record rows, to show more information on a row.
  • Notebook tabs, to put more information on the details layout. This was a much requested feature in FileMaker for the last ten years, requiring awful unmaintainable hacks to simulate it, which they even used in their example files. I notice that they are making a big deal about finally adding it in their marketing for the new FileMaker version.
  • Doubly-related fields. For instance, to put Actor(via Characters::actor_id)::Agent(via Actors::agent_id)::name on a Character’s details. In FileMaker you have to create a calculated field in the Actor table, which evaluates to Agent::name, and then show that calculated field on the Character details. This way is a lot simpler, so you don’t need to understand what I just explained.