Author Archive for Jerry Salem

Crossing Drupal Street IV

Published on October 10, 2011. 0 Comments

The last couple of installments were about understanding the basics of what makes a Drupal web site.  We covered nodes, views, and plugins, among other things.  We didn’t go unnoticed either.  While at the 2011 DevCon, I was featured on an episode of FileMaker Success Tips.

This week we are going to look at the integration of a Drupal web site and a FileMaker database.  We had a client with a specific need; an art school that offers classes to adults in their community.  They have a FileMaker back-end database that they use for registration and membership.  They also have a web site where people can view class offerings and enroll in classes.  The client would like to create a way to link these two independent databases.

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Published in FileMaker, Integration and Tips and tricks by Jerry Salem. Tags: Tags: , , .

Graph Data Not in a Row

Published on August 26, 2011. 1 Comment

The addition of charting in FileMaker version 11 was a long overdue and welcome addition. I don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth. This tool is great at showing histograms of grouped data, but there are a couple of things that are more challenging to do with this feature.

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Published in FileMaker and Tips and tricks by Jerry Salem. Tags: Tags: , .

Developer Conference Spot Check

Published on August 4, 2011. 0 Comments

I arrived to this year’s FileMaker Developer Conference (DevCon) with just enough time to drop my bags and get to the Keynote Session.  I don’t think I would recommend cutting the trip so close next time, but it certainly made for an efficient day with an exciting ending.  The keynote was jam packed. It started with an overview of a few very nice solutions that have been built this past year to highlight the productivity gains and problems that can be solved with Filemaker Pro and FileMaker Go together.  In addition there were talks from FileMaker Product Managers on features that they are working on for future versions of Pro, Go and Server.  While I can’t go into any details here, I am certain that it will be a great year for FileMaker developers and users.

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Published in Conferences, DevCon, DevCon and FileMaker by Jerry Salem. Tags:

Navigating to List Views with Summary Parts

Published on July 25, 2011. 2 Comments

Here is a behavior I am not fond of. When I click on a button to go to a list, I expect to be at the top of the list on the first record.  This works fine if you are using any version of FileMaker.  However with version 10, Filemaker introduced a new wrinkle, sub-summary layout parts that are visible in Browse mode.  This wonderfully useful feature did introduce one unexpected consequence.

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Published in FileMaker and Tips and tricks by Jerry Salem. Tags: Tags: , .

Dial My Database

Published on July 5, 2011. 5 Comments

For the past few weeks I have been thinking about our last Philly FileMaker user group meeting back in May.  It was all about connecting your database to other services and extending your information to contacts and calendars outside of your database.  Imagine being able to dial a phone number right from your database!  How positively retro.

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Published in FileMaker Go and Tips and tricks by Jerry Salem. Tags: Tags: , , .

Tracking Changes in Your Database

Published on July 1, 2011. 1 Comment

Everyone likes a good story, even one that relates to a database. When you are working with a database that is shared among different users you will eventually see this scene, or perhaps experience it yourself:

You, or someone else, are staring at the computer screen looking at a record that has changed since the last time you looked at it and you mutter to yourself, “Who changed this record?  This is not the same as the last time I looked at it!”

An audit log is like looking at a record through time.  It will let you trace any changes that have been made on a piece of data in your database.  For example, in a contact management system an audit log will let you see address changes over time for a particular person.  You can use an audit log in an ordering system to track changes made to each invoice over time.  It is also an important tool for determining workflow processes. Remember the old adage, “who what when where why and how”.  Who changed this record? What data was changed? When was it changed? Why was it changed?and How?  An audit log can tell you all of these things (except probably the “Why”).

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Published in FileMaker and Tips and tricks by Jerry Salem. Tags: Tags: , , , .

Crossing Drupal Street III

Published on June 28, 2011. 1 Comment

This is where it may get hairy…

1490430-Who-needs-pictures-of-cute-kids-1

Compare relationships and querries

During the last episode we learned that Drupal is most powerful when the knowledgeable developer uses plug-ins to extend the abilities of the web site.  Some of the most useful plug-ins are CCK (adds the ability to create custom fields), Fivestar (adds a voting widget to your website) and Views (a powerful way to view data from different nodes).  We used the CCK to create a couple of new fields in the Things content type.

This episode we will show a basic technique to display information.  Lets say you want to see a list of content types.  To use FileMaker-speak, lets say you want to see a list of related records.

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Published in Integration and Tips and tricks by Jerry Salem. Tags: Tags: , , .

Choose the Right Layout

Published on May 6, 2011. 0 Comments

Ah the good old days!  Back when the status area was vertical, if you wanted to display a particular layout depending on some conditions, then you needed to create your own navigation buttons.  But face it, those buttons were never as good as the native navigation provided by FileMaker.  Thanks to script triggers we can use the built-in navigation buttons and also conditionally display a particular layout.

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Published in FileMaker and Tips and tricks by Jerry Salem. Tags: Tags: , , .

We can Sort it out

Published on March 30, 2011. 0 Comments

The other day I was sitting with a client, looking at a list view layout.  The client said to me, “Can you make it so that when I click the headers the columns will sort, like in Table View or Excel?”  No problem, I said; I’ll just make each header a button that runs a Sort script step.  They she said “Well, when I click each one it should sort ascending and then descending, just like Excel.”  Ok – a little bit more inconvenient; I need to use a script and a bunch of of fields to keep track of ascending/descending.  Finally, she dropped the bomb.  “Oh, can I have those cute little up and down arrows, like in Excel?”  That is the last straw, I thought.  Now I have to make scripts, fields AND graphic calculations for those dumb arrows.

There must be a better way to do this.  Using the great scientific tradition of standing on the shoulders of giants I searched the web for good solutions.  Using  a combination of scripting and merge global variables you can easily put up and down arrows next to sorted headers.  This technique only requires a script.  No extra fields are required go make it work.

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Published in FileMaker and Tips and tricks by Jerry Salem. Tags: Tags: , .

Show Your Stuff: Using Conditional Formatting to fit long content into fixed width fields

Published on January 7, 2011. 0 Comments

A common problem I run into is not being able to see all the information I need to in list view.  Consider the list view shown below, taking note of the Full Name field:

ListView1

As you can see, longer content – such as very long names – don’t fit within the allotted space.  Ordinarily you could just set anchors to have the field grow to the right, but in this particular use case, we already have one anchored field – Notes – set to grow rightward.

In this type of situation, I can call on Conditional Formatting to save the day.  I actually got the inspiration for this one by using the calculator on my iPod Touch.  Type a number and it appears in the calculator, pretty large.  If you keep typing digits, then number gets smaller to fit in the area of the display.   Brilliant! Continue reading ‘Show Your Stuff: Using Conditional Formatting to fit long content into fixed width fields’

 
Published in FileMaker and Tips and tricks by Jerry Salem. Tags: Tags: .