See the descriptions below each screen image. (Yes I know, the colors are terrible. I will change them soon!)
Above is the FFil 2.0 Setup form. Here you can select which forms are available for filtering. Plus you can give the form a user-friendly description, determine which views are allowed, and whether the value picklists are populated with real data. FFil can filter any bound form in your database.
Above is the main filtering menu in FFil 2. From here you can create, load, and manage form filters. There are dropdown lists with the forms, saved filters, field names, the common criteria (such as =, Null, Like, Between, etc.) and dropdown lists with real values for matching. New to version 2, you can select up to 24 criteria, with 6 levels of AND logic and 4 levels of OR logic. Besides applying the filter in either datasheet or form view, you can also see the Count of matching records. The SQL string can be displayed in the lower center. In the filter visible above, the form would be displayed in datasheet view, filtered to show only records for USA, Canada, and Mexico. The resulting filtered form is below:
Above is the filtered form in datasheet view, showing only the three countries specified in the filter.
You can also get the record count without applying the filter to the form. In the previous filter, there are 21 records.
The next screen is a new feature in FFil 2.0. See the description below the image.
The Value Dropdown menu (above) gives you new options for how FFil populates the 'Value' dropdown lists. In the earlier version, a form had dynamic lists of real values, or no values. With this menu, you can specify hard-coded lists, select statements, or saved queries for the value dropdown lists. This can speed up creating and editing filters, especially in client-server or larger applications. In the examples above, the 'State' field would use the Select statement to get a list of states. The 'Region' field uses a hard-coded lists of regions. 'Comments' would never have a dropdown list of values. 'ManagerName' would use the results of the query qryManagers. The behavior for these 4 fields over-rides the default behavior for the form itself as on the setup menu.
Also new to FFil 2.0, the report above shows information on the custom filters in your database. The 'North America..' filter used earlier is displayed here.
Download FFil 2.0 for Access 97: Download 97 zipped (148k)