By: Colin Keefe
Published on
September 8, 2010.
You might have said to yourself after reading my last cheerleading post on starting a FileMaker User Group (Why User Groups Matter), “Well, that’s all well and good, but you’re not the one trying to start a group in a virtual vacuum. Cheerleading’s easy.” Fine, point taken.
I realize that many of you are in regions that, on initial consideration, might not seem fertile ground for a user group. You may feel that being located in a smaller metropolitan area or rural region is an insurmountable roadblock to getting a group started. What’s the point of holding a first meeting if there’s no one else around?
Your first step is finding the 2 or 3 or 10 people you can connect with and agree to meet in person. We’ll get into the meat and potatoes of managing the group later; there’s no point talking about it until you’ve got enough interest to fill at least the seats around a kitchen table or bar booth. Finding people is, admittedly, hard. Luckily, there are plenty of online resources to datamine for prospects.
I ask for forbearance from those of you for whom all of this is painfully obvious. It’s not obvious to everybody, and this suite of blog posts is oriented to those at the beginner/intermediate stage of social networking (remember: user groups were perfecting social networking when Twitter’s founder was still in diapers). Continue reading ‘FileMaker User Groups: Thoughts and resources on getting started (Post #2)’
By: Jerry Salem
Published on
September 8, 2010.
There has been a lot of buzz floating around the web regarding the content management system called Drupal. Over the next couple of weeks I am going to investigate this growing platform from the perspective of a FileMaker developer. Drupal is not a Filemaker replacement, but there are definite use cases where Drupal is an ideal content management choice. Instead of my regular posts about filemaker techniques, I will explore how Drupal is similar and different from my platform of choice. With a nod to a good movie about exploring other cultures (Crossing Delancey) I am calling this series Crossing Drupal.
In this first installment I would like to simply lay out some simple terms, so we can all speak the same language. A rosetta stone if you will.
Continue reading ‘Crossing Drupal’
By: Colin Keefe
Published on
August 26, 2010.
So this guy walks into a San Diego hotel lobby…
I started thinking about this series of posts (yep, this is #1 in a series) after a few conversations I had with people at this year’s FileMaker DevCon. I’d strike up a conversation with someone at lunch or at the bar, we’d exchange stories and experiences…and inevitably the talk would shift to why people come to DevCon in the first place.
Reason number 1: for the community. Hands down. The clear pleasures and advantages of meeting other people who are engaged in the same practice as you – with whom you can share ideas, learn from and teach – always trump session topics, what’s on the lunch menu, what kind of swag you can haul back, or how many banners you can affix to the bottom of your convention badge. One of the things that’s sometimes lost when you do a hand count of how many people in the room have iPads is how many people in the room are there because of the other people. Continue reading ‘Why User Groups matter…and how to start one (Post #1)’
By: Jerry Salem
Published on
August 6, 2010.
Recently I was on a family trip to Pittsburgh. We were walking around the campus of Carnegie Mellon and I saw this memorial brick;
It got me to thinking about some of the monster databases that I have had to take over for clients. When I take over a project, often I am spending a great deal of time just trying to figure out what the developer was trying to do.
Our earlier posts on this blog are generally concerned with improving the user experience(better printing workflow) or getting more out of your data (One Report two sets of summarized data). Today I would like to return to that lowly person, the developer. Anything that I can do that can make my job easier will make be a better developer and ultimately make my customers happier. Or as my grandfather would say to my grandmother, “What would you do if I got hit by a bus?” Continue reading ‘Speak your Mind. Using Comments, part 1.’
By: Jason Mundok
Published on
July 23, 2010.
The status toolbar is the gray area located horizontally across the top of a FileMaker Pro 11 window and can be easily customized to suit your needs. If you’re using older versions of FileMaker, the status toolbar combines all of the functionality of the old status area, which was located on the left side of the window, and the optional standard toolbar, both of which existed in versions prior to FileMaker 10. By default the status toolbar comes loaded with commonly used features, such as record navigation (the book), Show All, New and Delete Record, and Find. Depending on how you use FileMaker, there may be other buttons that make more sense for you to have on the toolbar. With a few clicks, you can set up your FileMaker toolbar however you’d like.
Continue reading ‘Customizing the Toolbar in FileMaker Pro 11′
By: Robin Story
Published on
March 19, 2010.
While it may seem that in life there are very few black and white choices, in the database development world, the either/or option (on/off, yes/no, active/inactive, open/closed) is pretty common. We know these choices as Boolean options. Continue reading ‘Advancing Technique: Using Booleans to streamline data’
By: Jerry Salem
Published on
March 18, 2010.
It doesn’t matter what route you take if you don’t have a destination
-or-
Trigger happy
One thing that I really like about the direction that FileMaker has been going in since version 9 has been how the programming environment now encourages of the use of native UI features in FileMaker in highly customized solutions. Those of us who have been developing prior to FileMaker 9 – or those of us who have inherited solutions built before 9 – know all too well what it means to lock down the Status Area and then build core UI elements from scratch to replace the lost functionality. Many developer-hours have been spent to ‘reinvent’ features that were already in FileMaker, but in prior versions couldn’t be modified well enough to work in certain situations.
A clear, obvious example of this is the Toolbar. Almost every single ‘professional’ system I have worked with by default hides the Toolbar, and then the developer is forced to reinvent the forward and back buttons, the book/rolodex widget, and every other element of the Toolbar using buttons and scripts on the layout itself. What a waste of time!
In this blog post I’m going to look at one small segment of the Toolbar – the “View As” widget – as an example of how the Toolbar can be leveraged using Script Triggers. Continue reading ‘Easy Navigation between Form / List / Table views in FIlemaker 11 using ‘View as:’’
By: Chad Sager
Published on
March 12, 2010.
The Problem: Creating Master-Detail interface elements in Filemaker 10 and earlier was not straight forward.
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.
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.
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.
By: Jason Mundok
Published on
February 2, 2010.
At last week’s meeting I presented some FileMaker performance analysis findings that were compiled by Jason Young, Mighty Data (Denver, CO). He had shared them during his session “What’s Faster?” at the recent PauseOnError unconference in Portland, OR a few weeks back. Jason sent a follow-up email about some of his findings and some tidbits he’s learned since Pause On Error, along with the slides from his presentation, which are attached here. If you weren’t at the meeting, check out the meeting video on an earlier post to gain some context for this update (fast forward to the 54:20 mark).
Continue reading ‘Update from Jason Young on “What’s Faster?”’
By: Jerry Salem
Published on
January 18, 2010.
Problem:
Every once in a while, I have a client say, “I want to have the modification date on the layout. Oh, but I only care when the <<Insert Field Name here>> has been modified”.
Filemaker has a built in auto enter option on a field called ‘Modification’. This lets you create a field that gives you information about the last time the record was modified. You can capture any of the following: User Name, Account Name, Date, Time or Timestamp. This is a great function, but it updates the value whenever any field in the record is modified – in other words, it doesn’t give feedback as to which field was modified.
Continue reading ‘What’s so great about the Modification Date?’
Speak your Mind. Using Comments, part 1.
By: Jerry Salem
Recently I was on a family trip to Pittsburgh. We were walking around the campus of Carnegie Mellon and I saw this memorial brick;
It got me to thinking about some of the monster databases that I have had to take over for clients. When I take over a project, often I am spending a great deal of time just trying to figure out what the developer was trying to do.
Our earlier posts on this blog are generally concerned with improving the user experience(better printing workflow) or getting more out of your data (One Report two sets of summarized data). Today I would like to return to that lowly person, the developer. Anything that I can do that can make my job easier will make be a better developer and ultimately make my customers happier. Or as my grandfather would say to my grandmother, “What would you do if I got hit by a bus?” Continue reading ‘Speak your Mind. Using Comments, part 1.’