Tag Archive for 'Tips and tricks'

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FM Solutions – The IT Solutions FileMaker Newsletter

Published on June 3, 2009. 0 Comments

IT Solutions Consulting is pleased to announce its first issue of FM Solutions, a quarterly newsletter focused solely on FileMaker!  We launched this back in April; the next issue will be out in June.

FMSolutions April 2009 Newsletter

Our goal is to provide you with relevant news, tips, and ideas about innovative ways to use the FileMaker line of products and other related technologies to help you and your business run better and more efficiently. This first issue highlights a few of the great new user features in FileMaker Pro 10, tips on how to search for date ranges faster, and an innovative way that we integrated a FileMaker solution with an existing file server.

If you like what you see and would like to subscribe, email Jim Higgins: jim.higgins@itsolutions-inc.com.

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

Tips and Tricks: Open a FileMaker database using a Hyperlink

Published on April 27, 2009. 0 Comments

(Editor’s Note: As some of you know I’ve been asking my colleagues to write tips and tricks content for the blog.  At some point in the future we may be asking the group community at large for contributor content as well.   Jerry is a 9 Certified FileMaker Developer at ITS; he also runs the 101 and Intermediate trainings here.  Thanks, Jerry!

– Colin).

One thing that really gets my goat is multiple security gates.  If I have already logged into my computer using a login and pw, why do I still have to use another login and password to further authenticate myself when I open my database?  Worse yet, sometimes an end user will put in an account/password to get into the computer, then the SAME account/password info to log into the database.

There are a couple of ways around this.  Most programmers will tell you, “Use Single Sign On authentication.”  FileMaker developers will typically say, “Use an opener file and save the login and PW there.”

Both of these are fine if the situation merits or permits it.  Here I present another option.  In this case, the end users are not using active directory to manage Accounts.  They also don’t want to use an opener file, for a number of reasons that are outside the scope of this document. 

Continue reading ‘Tips and Tricks: Open a FileMaker database using a Hyperlink’

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

Tips and Tricks: Sharing Color Palettes in a multiple developer environment

Published on February 17, 2009. 0 Comments

Chad showed this one to me, but since it came up in a conversation with some other colleagues yesterday I thought I’d share it on his behalf.

It’s often the case that when designing a solution, you and the client agree on a color palette as part of the overall look and feel of the product.  However, when several developers are working on the same project, one needs a way to share those colors across the team.

On the Mac, one way to do this is by defining a new Color Palette, and share the Color Palette file with the other team members.  Since this trick uses the OS Color Palette tool, it’s Mac only.

Continue reading ‘Tips and Tricks: Sharing Color Palettes in a multiple developer environment’

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

Tips and Tricks: Arbitrarily Navigating an Array of Fields in FMP 10

Published on February 9, 2009. 0 Comments

To follow up with the presentation from Tuesday night, here is the first of half a dozen or so posts going into more detail on my demo files.

First up, navigating an array of fields in an arbitrary order (as opposed to tab order).

First, a little setup. To make this work you need to give layout object names to all the fields in the array. I just chose array01, array02, etc. so we can do some simple math to find out which object to go to.

Be sure and name and or number all your layout objects.

Be sure and name and or number all your layout objects.

When Filemaker allows us to go to field by name, this solution will be a little more elegant, for now you just need to name the layout objects and your field names can be arbitrary.

More after the jump:

Continue reading ‘Tips and Tricks: Arbitrarily Navigating an Array of Fields in FMP 10′

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

Tips and Tricks: Self Tooltipping Fields in Filemaker 10

Published on January 26, 2009. 0 Comments

(Editor’s Note:  Here’s the first post from Chad.  I’m monkeying with how to display author names in WordPress, but until then, you’ll have to live with a stupid Editor’s Note.)

 

Anyone with the dream of being able to show field comments as the tooltip, there finally is an answer.

In previous versions of Filemaker it was possible to grab the field comments on a layout for a tooltip, but only by hard-coding the name of the field in the tooltip.  This makes managing the tooltip a little cumbersome, you’d have to touch every field and give it an unique tooltip if so inclined.  In that case you might as well manage the text of the tooltip on the layout object. 

You’d need to put:

FieldComment ( Get ( FileName ) ; "Ship_Date" )

A couple of new functions now make this a lot easier, potentially inserting a single tooltip into all fields on all the layouts across your system, and then editing them in a centralized location.  The first is the Self function, introduced in Filemaker 9, and now the GetFieldName () function.

When editing a field definition, you can add comments to the field like so:
Modify Field Comments
 

Then, in layout mode you can select one or more fields and enter this as a tooltip:

 Add Tooltip to Layout

FieldComment ( Get ( FileName ) ; GetFieldName ( Self  ) )

And now when you mouse over the comments appear.

View Tooltip

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