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Advanced Calculation is now Procedures
Hello, sorry for the great delay...summer vacation, and now gearing up for F4 RC2 release.
Advanced Calculations are now called Procedures. They're intended to let you define a series of steps in querying the database, and interpreting the results of the query, so that you can do things that are more complex than single query operations like sums and so on.
If you have some operation you want to do that maybe requires two queries to be run, but the where clause of the second query is dependent on the outcome of the first query...that's the kind of thing Procedures is for. You can define the first step and what it's query is, and define some PHP that interprets the results. Then define step two and build SQL there that takes the output of the PHP from step 1 into account.
The really neat thing is that you can base your SQL around the "formulize base query" which includes whatever search terms and filtering the user has specified. So the intent is that you can define some advanced things you want to run on the data, and they will be tied into the rest of the UI options the user has chosen, so someone can run the Procedure on data where X=2 and someone else can choose the same Procedure, but they have filtered for X=10, for example.
We're working on this for a research project at the faculty of social work at the University of Toronto. There's some standard calculations that need to be done on a dataset, but those same calculations need to be available subdivided by age, or sex, or ethnicity, or any combination of the three. So this way, with the Procedures tied into the underlying "base query" that is generated by the search terms the user has chosen, the same standardized Procedure can by dynamically executed in the way the user wants.
I believe some more "in-line" documentation was included in a recent commit, so you could check the latest SVN version for a more up to date set of into....
HOWEVER, Herb at Freeform recently reported that he wasn't able to get part of a Procedure we're working on to actually execute. So there may very well still be bugs in this whole system. It is under active development.
I hope this helps. Let us know if you take a crack at it.
--Julian