🚀 go-pugleaf

About a week ago I posted a request for help with FileMaker,
specifically:

     The Boulder County Aids Project provides more than ten
     different services to clients either infected with HIV
     or having full blown AIDS. During a given report period
     services are delivered to more than 100 different
     clients. Suppose that among them are four clients who
     used the transportation service one or more times each.
     Specifically:

     Client A        3 times
     Client B        2 times
     Client C        Once
     Client D        6 times

     With FileMaker it is trivial to determine that the
     transportation service was used 12 times during the
     reporting period, but how does one determine that four
     clients used the service?

Four people responded, one suggesting that I use a real data base
program like 4th Dimension or Foxbase and the other three had the
following suggestion:

From: Martin Minow <minow@apple.com>

     Try defining a field that is zero if the service wasn't
     used and one if it was used at least once (if (used >
     0, 1, 0)) or something like that. Then, the summary
     layout just sums the value of that field.  This ought
     to work, but I haven't tried it.

The same solution was proposed by:

From: claris!wombat@ames.arc.nasa.gov (Scott Lindsey)
From: Gillian Bryant <cosc015@cantva.canterbury.ac.nz>

This solution does not work because it involves using the same
variable name on both sides of a calculation, something that
FileMaker does not permit.  After two phone calls and a fax to
Claris it turns out that the following clever trick (kludge?)
works:

     NumClient           = Count of Name
     Calc1               = Summary(NumClient, Name)
     Calc2               = 1 / calc1
     Clients per service = Total of Calc2

With these variables defined, it is possible to create a
columnar layout with a sub-summary part sorted by service.
The fields in this part are "Service" and "Client per
Service".

Thanks to Martin, Scott and Gillian for their suggestions
and I hope this will help others who might have a similar
problem.

Cheers - Carl