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for peer-to-peer support of the FileMaker Platform and related products and services.
Author’s note: Inevitable comparisons will be drawn between the new While function and the venerable CustomList custom function, which I wrote about at length several years ago. Preliminary testing indicates that CustomList is faster under certain circumstances and While is faster under others. In my opinion, both of them belong in your developer tool kit. […]
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Michael Layne from Gearbox Solutions presents on FileMaker’s new JSON functions. He does a deep dive into FileMaker’s new JSON functions and demos several examples of how they are using JSON for passing parameters, populating form data, validation and rollback, managing session info such as value lists as global. Michael also demos REST client and REST server with new data API.
The post FileMaker JSON, REST, and the Data API appeared first on Blue Feather - FileMaker Developer, Android, We
[ Edit: 3/16/2016 - With the help of some other people, we have been able to recover, or recreate some of the original images from original thread. ]
Security is always a big topic when it involves data, or people, or possessions. Recently, over on the FileMaker Community, there was a very beneficial discussion regarding security. Unfortunately, that discussion was the victim of a necessary action...and was deleted. It was deleted, because the discussion was tied to a video that, as was det
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
FileMaker Kanban is the latest tool that offers familiar functionality for users and flexibility for the developer. It offers great functionality and organizes your data visually into lanes and cards.
The post FileMaker Kanban: Organize Your Data appeared first on Geist Interactive.
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FileMaker Pro, the Jewell of Claris
FileMaker Pro is the best known Claris software. For more than 30 years, it has enabled low-code application designers to develop database-oriented applications with unparalleled flexibility. With FileMaker Pro, you will be able to design powerful tools adapted to the specificities of your organization, from your Mac or your PC under Windows.
Create relational databases without even knowing about databases.
Design beautiful and easy to use interfaces (layo
In FileMaker, once you've filtered a portal, which displays a subset of related data, there may be situations where you need to get that data out. A prime example is needing to further manipulate the data within a spreadsheet.
A recent solution I was developing had this exact need. I needed to filter some financial data based on a wide date range. Yet, I still needed smaller subsets, think categories, of financial data and wanted to pull that data into a spreadsheet for a separate purpose.
In
As Claris FileMaker continues to expand and update its product line, Linux compatibility was a welcomed change. This guide will outline how to install FileMaker Server on a machine running Ubuntu. Includes video and demo file. Read the full article here.
Michael Rocharde and I started the Fireside FileMaker podcast way back in 2019. We've recorded 45 episodes along with our good friend Marc Larochelle. But, all things come to an end... at some point. I'm proud of the work I've done on the Podcast so I want to share some of my favorite episodes. There will also be a listing of all the Podcasts in case you are just discovering the show. Thanks for your support and Happy FileMaking!View the full article
FM Quickstart, the premier free ERP app for FileMaker, has been updated for the latest version of FileMaker. Several new features have been added including Leads and Opportunities modules, QuickBooks Online Integration, iPhone functionality, and more. Includes demo videos. Read the full article here.
To download FM Quickstart, visit the official FM Quickstart website.
While there are some features which FileMaker provides natively, I often wonder how heavily they are used. One feature in particular is the Saved Finds feature, which is only available in Find Mode. It's a great feature in terms of convenience, however, its implementation is right on top of the funky developer'ish UI. It's buried many levels deep within multiple dialogs (if you want to modify any of the saved searches) and it's just not as pretty as developing your own within a dedicated layout
The Power of Three – Linking FileMaker, WordPress & WooCommerce to Manage Product Listings for Print Catalog & Webstore Sales
How eXcelisys is helping a large-scale K-12 curriculum distributor close the book on its content management misery
The Client: A leading developer, publisher and distributor of K-12 learning materials with annual revenue exceeding $27+ million (according to Dun & Bradstreet). The client distributes 15,000+ titles from 1,000+ publishers and produces its
Hi all!
In this article we showcase a range of Logo and Profile picture retrieval APIs and how they can be integrated into your FileMaker solutions to automatically download images for your contacts.
We also show how background content can be removed from these images, again through using background removal APIs.
Finally, we talk a bit about why using these could benefit your solution and when all else fails what other options are available for adding some visual presentation for
In FileMaker, some features seem like they should be an easy solve. Yet, the dynamic nature of creating something in FileMaker means its development simply can't account for all the possible things a developer might want to do.
When it comes to showing the actual count of records being shown within a filtered portal one might think the solution would already be there. However, it's not.
You have to apply some creating thinking along with a bit of inside know-how in order to correctly show the
Over the years, clients have asked me for a variety of reporting features that aren't easily created with standard subsummary and summary tools. A lot of them, including this technique, use the GetSummary function. I remember having such a hard time wrapping my head around the GetSummary logic when I was working in technical support. Once, I got over the hump, GetSummary became one of my best friends, helping me overcome all kinds of FileMaker battles. In this article, I'll demonstrate how to pr
In the world of software development, there are few tools you simply can't live without. A debugger is the first which comes to mind; because no one gets their code exactly perfect the first time. Plus, it's always a matter of figuring things out until they work as expected or desired.
There are also those "other" tools which you can't really live without. ESPECIALLY, if you're working with a solution file which was created by someone other than yourself! When you need to discover what the heck
Demo files: set-var-by-name-v4 and set-var-by-name-md5 Background This is a quick follow up to last December’s Set Variable By Name Revisited, and to avoid repetition will assume the reader is familiar with the material that was presented in that article. But to briefly recap: 1. FileMaker does not provide an obvious way to programatically name a… Continue reading Set Variable By Name Re-RevisitedView the full article
In this article we show you how to use the contents of a FileMaker container field to produce beautiful gradients and solid background fills based on the container images most prominent colors.
We also show how to render solid fills without the use of a web viewer (for portal display) and how to determine optimal color for text placed on top of your background fills.
As always, an example file has been lovingly crafted to help you explore these techniques
You can read the article
Oh the pain of a slow rendering layout! The other day I came across a painfully slow layout which was literally CRAWLING. It reminded me of one of my own situations where I needed to create a solution for some type of creative data input. This, of course, was based on FileMaker's input limitations between two types of fields.
The choice of using a Drop-down list over a Pop-up menu field style was based on the type of input being managed. I didn't want the forced interaction of having to click,
FileMaker on Linux / Docker – Presentation at Kentuckiana Developers Group
A few weeks ago, Jonathan Fletcher was kind enough to invite Romain Dunand (@airmoi) and I (@FabriceN) to do a presentation at his Kentuckiana Developers Group.
Discover all the possible ways of hosting FileMaker databases
The topic was a comparison of all possible ways to host a FileMaker database, from local server to Virtual Private Server, to, of course, our fmcloud.fm Linux/Docker solution.
If you want to unders
Every once in a while you need to store something with an extra bit of security. Maybe it's a password or some super secret text with a winning stock market strategy. Whatever it is, you don't just want to rely on the authentication, privilege set and possible EAR (encryption at rest) on the file.
You want to store the data itself with even that much more security. By encrypting it with CryptEncryptBase64() of course! The trick is this. How do you capture that data, before it's written to the d
This is Part 2 of a series about using the DataTables JavaScript library in order to simply pull data you wish to display and doing so within a Web Viewer.
While standard FileMaker Portals present one of the easiest methods for showing related data, it's now a viable option to simply use a Web Viewer to present data to the user. With the bi-directional support of JavaScript within FileMaker 19 and higher we can take advantage of what JavaScript does best - being fast!
In this video we focus sp
Portals and list views represent one of the biggest reasons for using a database for managing data. You can view the data in a myriad of ways and FileMaker provides the tools to modify the views quite easily.
FileMaker's list view happens to be the most powerful when compared to portals. We don't really have the same feature set presented within a portal. Using a portal it's an all or nothing approach to sorting by default and you can't really search the portal contents. You can certainly hack
INTRODUCTION Today I want to take a look at a certain Perform Script On Server (PSOS) behavior, and for those who find this behavior to be inconvenient, propose a work around. Here’s the behavior, or misconception, actually: a server side script initiated via PSOS (apparently) cannot access files on the server unless the user already… Continue reading PSOS – Run Script in File not open LocallyView the full article
Scripting a change log table has been around since script triggers were introduced in FileMaker 10. But, do you know the right way to script a field modification log? I've been programming them for years and have gone through every version of them and have settled on what I'm going to cover today. We'll start off with the wrong way to script an event log so you can get some perspective but will end up with a dynamic solution that can be copied and pasted from FileMaker file to FileMaker file.Vie
What's the easiest way to format a FileMaker date, time or timestamp value? Using a custom function? Maybe...
In this video, I'll show you a unique trick for getting a formatted date, time or timestamp value without using a Custom Function or any of FileMaker's Date or Time functions. Of course, I'll also provide you with one of the better custom functions for formatting date/time/timestamp values.
The custom function in this technique file handles pretty much all possible variations of date/t
Anyone can just throw everything they need within a portal. Adding a new field? Just throw it in the portal. But WAIT! The question is "Should you?". The fine art of determining what should end up in your portal is based on how the data and/or actions are being referenced/used.
Is the frequency for editing the data high or low? If it's low, then maybe the user doesn't need field access. What is the frequency of record deletion? Low? Then, do you really need that obvious red trash can icon on ev
