Archive for the 'Tips and tricks' Category

FM Academy Webinar January 18th – Our own Jerry Salem!

Published on January 11, 2012. 0 Comments

For those of you who don’t know, Philly FileMaker’s sponsor, IT Solutions Consulting, has partnered with 360Works, MightyData, Anvil Dataworks, Fiddlehead Software, Skeleton Key and Kyo Logic on a new initiative called FM Academy, which has been producing free webinars whose purpose is to further educate FileMaker users and developers to encourage best practices, and to foster further adoption of the software.

Why post it here?  Well, PFUG regulars will be very familiar with our own Jerry Salem, who will be hosting a webinar January 18th at 2 PM EST, called Playing Nicely with Others – FileMaker and Content Management Systems.

There’s still time to register!  Go here for details:

http://www.filemakeracademy.com/?page_id=49

 
Published in Tips and tricks and Training by Colin Keefe. Tags: Tags: , , .

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.

Continue reading ‘Crossing Drupal Street IV’

 
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.

Continue reading ‘Graph Data Not in a Row’

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

Continue reading ‘Navigating to List Views with Summary Parts’

 
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.

Continue reading ‘Dial My Database’

 
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”).

Continue reading ‘Tracking Changes in Your Database’

 
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.

Continue reading ‘Crossing Drupal Street III’

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

FMPHP: Passing an array of values and performance testing on adding records

Published on June 7, 2011. 0 Comments

In my previous post about the difference between the createRecord() and newAddCommand() functions in PHP, Anders Monsen asked in comments:

I’ve never tried the createRecord method, but the ability to send an array of field values in the method seems very interesting. How would you format this data in the $values array?
$rec =& $fm->createRecord(‘Form View’, $values);
The PHP API lacks good examples of each of the methods in the class, and this post brings attention to an alternate method to set data, though I’m not certain when it might be useful, aside from bypassing the large XML array in the $result. Might be worth a try to see the differences in performance.

So two worthy questions, for which I have answers! Continue reading ‘FMPHP: Passing an array of values and performance testing on adding records’

 
Published in FileMaker, Integration and Tips and tricks by Robin Story. Tags: Tags: , , , .

FMPHP: The difference between createRecord() and newAddCommand()

Published on May 19, 2011. 4 Comments

If you’ve been looking at building custom PHP scripts to add records to your FileMaker database, you might have come across the following snippet from the Custom Web Publishing with PHP document:

There are two ways to create a record:

  • Use the createRecord() method, specifying a layout name, and optionally specifying an array of field values. You can also set values individually in the new record object.The createRecord() method does not save the new record to the database. To save the record to the database, call the commit() method.
    For example:
    $rec =& $fm->createRecord('Form View', $values);
    $result = $rec->commit();
  • Use the Add command. Use the newAddCommand() method to create a FileMaker_Command_Add object, specifying the layout name and an array with the record data. To save the record to the database, call the execute() method.
    For example:
    $newAdd =& $fm->newAddCommand('Respondent', $respondent_data);
    $result = $newAdd->execute();

Which is somewhat helpful, but many people wonder what the substantive difference is between these two statements. Continue reading ‘FMPHP: The difference between createRecord() and newAddCommand()’

 
Published in FileMaker, Integration and Tips and tricks by Robin Story. 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.

Continue reading ‘Choose the Right Layout’

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