Author Archive for Chad Sager

FileMaker 11 and OS X Lion

Published on July 21, 2011. 2 Comments

For those OS X users itching to get onto Lion, but FileMaker compatibility is holding you back, you have a dim green light. FileMaker just posted some details on FileMaker’s compatability.

Proceed with caution since there might some hidden ‘gotchas’ that haven’t come to light yet. But if you don’t use Web publishing, older excel exports (Pre-Excel 2007), Asian characters and 0 and negative decimal place, you might dip your toe in the water.

OS upgrades are serious business, especially with production systems, so we don’t recommend jumping in cold. Test on a development server and non-production clients first, and be sure and have a full backup of both your computer and custom FileMaker solution.

 
Published in Uncategorized by Chad Sager. Tags: Tags: , , .

I’m just a stupid developer, don’t confuse me… part 3 of 3

Published on April 29, 2011. 2 Comments

I’ve been posting about a few principles that have helped me minimize the pain of understanding complexity in my own code. See part 1 of this series where I briefly discussed leaving yourself and others notes about the “why” of your design decisions. And see part 2 for discussions about simplifying your code.

Continuing with the movement towards simplicity; whenever possible make functions and scripts single use and encapsulated. We can think about breaking functions (or scripts) down into their smallest useable parts as simplification, or we can talk about it as encapsulation. We broke down a confusing custom function into separate parts in order to improve readability. What we also gained was some compartmentalization and modularity. It’s difficult to separate the two principles of simplicity and encapsulation.

Continue reading ‘I’m just a stupid developer, don’t confuse me… part 3 of 3′

 
Published in FileMaker by Chad Sager. Tags: Tags: , , , , , , .

I’m just a stupid developer, don’t confuse me… part 2 of 3

Published on April 28, 2011. 2 Comments

See part 1 of this series where I briefly discussed leaving yourself and others clues about the “why” of your design decisions.

The second principle I want to talk about helps with the “how” and “what”.

It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.
- Albert Einstein

Or how it’s more often paraphrased:

Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.

Take the time to make things simpler. This is much more about the “how” and “what” of programming.

Continue reading ‘I’m just a stupid developer, don’t confuse me… part 2 of 3′

 
Published in FileMaker by Chad Sager. Tags: Tags: , , , , , , .

I’m just a stupid developer, don’t confuse me… part 1 of 3

Published on April 27, 2011. 0 Comments

Our human brain has the amazing capacity to remember and understand the things we do. What’s more amazing is our brain’s capacity to overestimate how much it has the ability remember and understand the things we do. My average shelf life for remembering how my code works is about two months. That is to say if I don’t touch a part of an application for up to two months, I can jump in and get back to work, no problem. After that I have to study it a bit and get my bearings again. The longer I go the worse it gets. Your mileage may vary, but no one can escape this problem.

There are a few things that have helped me minimize the pain described above, which I’ll be posting about over the next couple of days.

Continue reading ‘I’m just a stupid developer, don’t confuse me… part 1 of 3′

 
Published in FileMaker by Chad Sager. Tags: Tags: , , , , , , , .

FileMaker Go now supports Charts, Printing and Signatures!

Published on April 20, 2011. 0 Comments

FileMaker Go for iPad/iPhone Updated

What’s New in Version 1.2.1
- Adds support for FileMaker Charts (compatible with FileMaker Pro 11).
- Records and saves signatures to the database file.
- Adds support for printing.
- Improves rendering, display, and printing of PDFs.
- Sends notification to user when there is a record lock conflict.
- Adds ability to open hidden files.
- Resolves compatibility issues when running on iPad.

Update:
Check out the “FileMaker Go 1.2 In Two Minutes”

 
Published in FileMaker and FileMaker Go by Chad Sager. Tags: Tags: , .

Use “Set Window Title” Script Step to Give Users Feedback on What They’re Waiting For

Published on February 7, 2011. 1 Comment

Problem: Users are waiting for your FileMaker solution to perform an action, but it takes a long time.

How to help ease the pain: Use “Set Window Title” script step to give them feedback.

FileMaker has no built in progress indicator, so whether your scripted processes take 10 seconds or 10 minutes, your users might not know what’s going on. You can create layouts or pop-up windows to tell them “Hang on, I’m working on something,” but it’s hard to give them live feedback. If you’re jumping around to different contexts and doing other things, you usually use a “Freeze Window” script step to hide the ugly guts of the system from the user. So to update information for the user, you have to return to the status layout and refresh or re-freeze the window.

As a developer, that adds a lot of work for you. That’s time you could be spending on making your processes faster, or making your user experience better.

In steps “Set Window Title”. It’s a fast, easy to maintain way to give your users some insight into what you’re working on, or how much longer they need to wait. The best part of it all is you don’t need a “Refresh Window” step to update it. The window title gets updated and is not context dependent. Just set it and forget it.

Set Window Title doesn't need a window refresh...

 
Published in FileMaker, Tips and tricks and Uncategorized by Chad Sager. Tags: Tags: , .

Filemaker Go Update: Updated

Published on September 22, 2010. 1 Comment

Filemaker just released a new update to Filemaker Go this morning, and it’s big!

A particularly huge item that seemed to slip through the cracks of the new features list is:

iOS app developers may take advantage of the newly enhanced URL protocol from FileMaker for calling FileMaker Go. Using the URL protocol, developers can now specify a FileMaker Pro script and script parameters. This allows developers of commercial and in-house iOS applications to extend FileMaker Go databases and provide a wide spectrum of useful solutions such as bar code scanning.

Press Release

This means that you can write applications for iOS and call scripts in Filemaker using parameters. You can’t even do this in Filemaker Pro! Who needs to to use plugins on iOS, just use iOS apps, communication can go both ways by registering a url scheme for your own app that Filemaker can call to trigger actions.

Filemaker Go 1.1.1 Update Page

Filemaker Go Update

- Take photos, add them to the database, and email as an attachment
- Convert records to PDF and email file from the database
- Save a copy of a database and email it as an attachment
- Import records from FileMaker Pro databases to FileMaker Go via scripts
- Be able to require users to re-log onto FileMaker Go after iPhone hibernates
- Solves compatibility issues running on iPhone

I think these have got to be some of the biggest requests on my list. I’m downloading as we speak.

 
Published in FileMaker Go and FileMaker Inc. by Chad Sager. Tags: Tags: , , , .

Easy Master-Detail in Filemaker 11 Using Filtered Portals

Published on March 12, 2010. 1 Comment

The Problem: Creating Master-Detail interface elements in Filemaker 10 and earlier was not straight forward.

Masster-Detail

You’d have to create a field to store the id of the currently selected record, then create a relationship matching just that id. If you’re in a multi-user setting you’d have to make sure the id storage field was global, so that selection was per user, not per record, otherwise you’d have the problem when one user changed the selection the selection would change for everyone.

The Solution: Now in Filemaker Pro 11 that all goes away with Filtered Portals.

Setting the global variable can use the same mechanism (onObjectEnter) on the portal. Remember though, in Filemaker Pro 11 you’ll need to add a refresh to update the portal.

Set Selected ID

Now all you have to do is set a script that sets a global variable, drop a relationship on the layout (potentially the same relationship you make the selection from) and filter it by the selected id.

Filtered Portal

Set the Calculation of the Filtered portal to match the selected ID with the record ID

Now you’ve got a simple interface that is easier to maintain and modify.

 
Published in FileMaker and Tips and tricks by Chad Sager. Tags: Tags: , , .

Filemaker Tips and Tricks: To Maximize or Not to Maximize

Published on September 16, 2009. 1 Comment

Window management in a cross-platform environment using Filemaker can be a bother. Through no fault of Filemaker’s,  OS X and Windows just handle windows differently. Developers have a decision to make about how to make their Filemaker app consistent for all users.

Continue reading ‘Filemaker Tips and Tricks: To Maximize or Not to Maximize’

 
Published in Tips and tricks by Chad Sager. Tags: Tags: .

Tips and Tricks: Start Script Debugger Quickly

Published on September 3, 2009. 2 Comments

Have you ever been too lazy to click twice and select Tools>Script Debugger when you were about to run a script from the Script Manager? I thought so, because I am. A quick shortcut is to hold down the shift key as you click on the Run button. Voila! The Script Debugger magically opens and pauses on the first script step.

 
Published in Tips and tricks and Uncategorized by Chad Sager. Tags: Tags: , , , .