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Hacking Your Own FileMaker Platform Solutions
Should FileMaker Platform developers mount hacking attacks on their own solutions? At first glance, this may seem an odd question. But I believe that the answer is “Yes, we should.”
Consider this. As developers we see our solutions from a totally different perspective than Threat Agents see them. Without practicing our own hacking skills, we can become blind to the vulnerabilities a Threat Agent can exploit to compromise the Confidentiality
Forums are a great way to get technical advice for FileMaker but for some reason, many people don't think they have to be nice in the electronic world. I was raised to say "please" and "thank you" and that has translated over to the internet for me. But, other folks think the anonymity of cyberspace is an excuse to be a jerk. Some posters are outright offensive and others will just leave snide responses like, "that wasn't much help". News flash! People on the internet are real and you should be
Hierarchical JSON Viewer / Editor
By Andy Persons & Doug West
One of the standout new features of FileMaker Pro 16 is native support for the JSON data-interchange format. In addition to providing easy integration with a host of online services, it also provides developers with the tools to create robust hierarchical structures for use entirely within FileMaker. This hierarchical JSON viewer / editor file provides some tools for visualizing, manipulating, and leveraging JSON text.
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Part 2: What Should You Consider When Selecting a Development Partner? What Questions Might You Ask a Potential Developer?
Hiring a developer is about creating a working relationship. You want someone who gets your business and gets you. Having a good working relationship often determines the success or failure of a development project. Hire someone you are comfortable with who also has the skills necessary to make your project successful. Beyond the quality of the working relationsh
GoDraw3 is a FileMaker drawing tool for users. For FileMaker developers, however, it is full of customization. A developer can do with it what she wants.
The post GoDraw3: Hack the Heck Out of It appeared first on Geist Interactive.
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West Coast FMPug Tour Guest Speaker Jason Thomas on Sales
This week, the Skeleton Key office will sacrifice the physical presence of our beloved head of sales – Jason Thomas – as he travels to the West Coast to speak to enthusiastic
Jason’s topic is Sales. His goal is to expand awareness of the need for a sales process while leveraging the expertise that already resides within both the in-house developer and consultant communities. He hopes to provide new knowledge, and improve attendees
Have you ever wished there were an easy way to summarize the contents of one portal in another portal? Perhaps something along the lines of the “Summary” portal below? I’ve touched on the possibility of using a portal to produce (or assist in the production of) an on-screen summary report a couple times in the [...]
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This weekend, Todd Geist and I took the train up from LA for a 33 hour code sprint and built the start of Worx, the next file for GoZync.
This is a great way to work and we got a ton done.
Todd on the Coast Starlight
Worx is a work orders system for iPad: users in the office assign orders to technicians and those techs “zync” the orders down to their iPads before completing the orders. Orders come down with contact info, maps, and a serious items database capable of browsing and selecti
This is a fresh story of me spending hours trying to fix a technical issue and accidentally revealing a gold nugget. A few days ago one of my nightly server-side scripts stopped working without any apparent reason. But when I tried to run the script in FileMaker Pro it worked just fine. I really needed a way to debug the script on the server.
Read more here
Skeleton Key - The Positive Effect
Marketing – be it 'traditional', word-of-mouth, grassroots or social media based, is not new for me.
Marketing for Skeleton Key, a service-driven, Custom Application Development/Information Technology Consulting company is relatively new for me.
My adventure began in mid-January...
In order to promote and solidify the Skeleton Key (SK) brand to the widest-reaching audience and business consumers of FileMaker software, I had to learn to understand wha
Broadly speaking, FileMaker developers fall into three categories: a) those who do all their development on local files; those who do all their development on hosted files; and c) those who sometimes develop locally, and sometimes in a hosted environment. I happen to fall into category “c”, and suspect that most of my colleagues [...]
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Kiosk mode is a cool way to run a FileMaker database in a full screen environment where users are prevented from accessing the other functionality of the operating system. But what if you have a normal FileMaker solution and wish to use kiosk functionality in certain areas only?
In this article we illustrate how a typical FileMaker solution can be enhanced with a kiosk component for carrying out certain actions. We use the article example file to help illustrate this. We also give some inf
Ever since I posted part 2 of this series, I’ve been torn between, on the one hand, wanting to move on to other topics; and on the other, the realization that I wasn’t quite done with this one yet. So, here is what I expect will be my final posting, and final demo (dynamic list [...]
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How To Article Featured in October Newsletter for FileMaker TechNet
Mark Richman, President of Skeleton Key, was both flattered and happy to contribute his FileMaker “How To” article, Replicating an External Authentication Environment for Development, in the October, 2011 issue of the FileMaker Technical Network e-Newsletter that circulated today.
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I noticed that one of the articles updated in the official FileMaker Knowledge Base on September 23, 2011 was explaining how to select a random set of records in a FileMaker database. I was wondering how fast the currently recommended technique is and whether Ican make it faster with the help of FM Bench. I tried to apply it to a set of 50,000 records of randomly generated data. Then I made it much faster…
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Aggressive Hiring Initiative Successful for Continued Growth
Skeleton Key has made significant progress in meeting its hiring goals in Q3 with the addition of Technology Consulting division and Application Development division. <p><a href="http://www.skeletonkey.com/images/Blog/EricChris_polaroid_2011-09-22.jpg">
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Well, I thought I’d said everything I had to say on this subject, but yesterday afternoon I noticed a glaring omission in part 1′s demo — what happens if the user manually unsorts the found set? The sort indicator doesn’t disappear the way a good little sort indicator should. Fortunately this is easily remedied, thanks [...]
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GoZync can be a little tricky to add to your file, this is why many people build out from our example FMGo file, and why we offer implementation packages to do it for you. Once it’s in, however, GoZync is quite easy to extend. It is a framework, after all, and we built it to be extensible.
We anticipated that you’d add fields to mobile solutions you already deployed–thus GoZync can deliver new builds to your users–and we made it easy to add fields to mappings you’ve already established. This v
Earlier this year, I posted a three-part series on Portal Sorting, and part 2 focused on dynamically sorting a portal when a column heading was clicked. Well, with just a few tweaks, this technique can be applied to dynamic sorting of found sets, and of course the most likely place to employ something like this [...]
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Very proud of the crew in the UK for pulling this off. Sessions look great; really wish I could get there.
Ian’s stuff on SQL in particular is very much in line with what we’re working on these days. SQL + Virtual List = Happy. Other’s I’m looking forward to… Carl Henshall : Customisable Shrinkwrap Solutions, John Renfrew : Supercharging PDF, and Fabrice Nordmann : Using xml structure within FileMaker.
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Two weeks ago I wrote an article about a FileMaker custom function I needed to preprocess some data imported from the web. I used this custom function in an auto-enter calculation to immediately preprocess the data while being imported. I created a server-side script that does the import every morning. But when I discovered that the import was taking over an hour every day, I saw it deserves some optimization. I used FM Bench Detective and optimized the custom function to evaluate up to several
I needed to decode HTML encoded text in FileMaker. I thought this must have been done many times before, so I tried to search for a suitable custom function at BrianDunning.com and FMFunctions.com. After checking few functions I found one that seemed pretty good...
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Locks, Keys, and Lock-Picking
By
Steven H. Blackwell
Platinum Member Emeritus, FileMaker Business Alliance
Recently, an experienced FileMaker Pro developer posed a question on developer group list about the behavior of FileMaker Pro files. Paraphrased, that question is as follows:
We've come across a small, but possible, security issue.
If a user has clicked the "Remember my password in my keychain", anyone can log in to the FMP system if the person has access t
Dear FileMaker Hacks, In my personnel database, how can I find all birthdays in a given range, for example, between September 8 and November 15? — Perplexed in Peoria Dear Perplexed, You do come up with some interesting questions. As I recall from our previous correspondence, you are in the US, where dates are formatted [...]
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Dear FileMaker Hacks, My personnel database has a scripted routine that locates all employees with birthdays in the current month, like so: When I sent a copy of the database to our sister organization in Australia, the scripted routine did not function properly for them. Could it have something to do with their computer expecting [...]
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Displaying a long list of items on a layout generally means that the majority of the list is hidden from the user until they click into the field, with no feedback as to the size of the list. This article details a nice technique you can use to present the same list in a truncated style that gives live feedback on the number of items.
Read the Full Article Here…
Here is a short video showing how we’re collapsing GoZync’s left hand side bar as you rotate your iPad.
For another gorgeous example of this technique, and more details, check out Yann Liqueur-Salzedo’s work here.
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