Welcome to our community, full of great ideas on developing your FileMaker solutions effectively,
for peer-to-peer support of the FileMaker Platform and related products and services.
The FileMaker Script Debugger is powerful. Its features are often overlooked. In this post we examine the buttons that control stepping through a script.
The post Like a Boss: Using the Script Debugger to its Full Potential appeared first on Geist Interactive.
View the full article
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
WidgetStudio makes it easy to use, design and share powerful interface widgets, like calendars, gauges, charts, and timers. Pick from the constantly growing set of included widgets or build your own. Freely share them with your customers or friends.
The post Announcing WidgetStudio – FileMaker WebViewer Widgets appeared first on Geist Interactive.
View the full article
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.
Features
The FileMaker Let function is your tool to make a calculation readable, well formatted and easy to debug. Let us discuss how it can be used.
The post Like a Boss: Let us Discuss the FileMaker Let Function appeared first on Geist Interactive.
View the full article
Continuing on with the two part series about Narrow vs. Wide tables, this video will go into how to best filter your data, especially if you have a large amount. It will present the data within the structure we'd created within the first video.
Knowing the impact of data operations isn't just limited to the structure of your tables. It's also about how much data is loaded and shown to the user based on what the user needs to see. If you have a relationship resulting in hundreds of thousands of
A long, long time ago, in a far away land, Bob Cusick, of Clickware, sent me a tip file that used a single field to log changes to fields in a table. Through the years I modified it and released it many times but here’s the latest version. This version is so abstracted, all you need is a single custom function with parameters that specify the fields that trigger the log and the log field itself. That means you can copy and paste the formula from table to table and make minor changes to create lo
Earlier today I needed 1 billion to render in the calc engine as 1000000000, but FM helpfully converts numbers to scientific notation if they A) are >= 1 billion, and B) contain nothing but zeros following the initial digits. Example where “A” and “B” are both true: Example where “A” is true but “B” is… Continue reading Bypassing Scientific Notation View the full article
Like any good craftsperson, you should know your tools and your methods for accomplishing things in the most efficient and best performing way. This is always most obvious when it comes to that every slowing FileMaker solution which started out innocently as a simple "helper" database. Then... it ended up being used for all kinds of things. Critical things even!
It was thrown together based on how you mentally "see" the data and not how the data should have been structured. This is one of those
Gonector allows custom FileMaker apps for iPhone or iPad to seamlessly integrate directly with various mobile devices such as digital scales, RFID readers and mobile printers. Today we are happy to announce version 2.0 which doubles the number of supported devices.
The plug-in has been out for almost three years now and enabled some great apps to replace manual work with modern technologies, such as RFID and digital scales, without compromising the ease of use and develop
We're thrilled to announce the release of our fist add-on called elemental_dropzone. With this really easy to use add-on you're given the power of dragging multiple. files directly into your solution all at once. You can even drop entire folders into your solution.
Once dropzone is installed just drag it onto your lay out and specify a script for the dropped files to be sent to for processing - it's really that simple.
Best of all it is 100% free.
If you're new to FileMaker and don't know where to start, you're in luck! We've been working with FileMaker since 2003 on hundreds of projects, and we want to share our expertise with beginners like you. This collection of resources will help you get started building custom FileMaker Apps today. Read the full article here.
Reduce AWS Bill: Delete Snapshots with Python Lambda Script
When old snapshots pile up, so do costs – try these slick tricks to trim the bloat
By Leif Hanson, Full Stack Developer
So the billing department calls to inquire about eXtra eXpenses from AWS due to 14,000 32GB snapshots having piled up.
Unbeknownst to you, some backup script has gotten away from your team and started backing up repeatedly. Maybe you’re intentionally keeping around petabytes of backup data? Or maybe you need a pr
It seems like it's taken decades for many businesses and government agencies to move from pushing paper into the digital age of transactions. Recently, I was reminded of this by heading into town hall and having to push a bit of paper myself. Banks and other financial institutions still actually offer paper options surprisingly. I guess being in the world of tech comes with its own biases. But, despite the seemingly slow adoption, the migration is still happening and more and more things are goi
Have you ever opened an existing solution, took one look at the scripting - and your eyes just glazed over - as if you were attempting to deView the full article
Even if it's not a super interesting topic, and really only applies if you're managing a FileMaker server, it always pays to know how things work behind the scenes. If you've never used FileMaker's external authentication via LDAP then you'll want to watch this particular video.
If you're creating any type of FileMaker solution which needs to know when your users both enter and exit the system, which especially applies to using external authentication, then you'll enjoy the super simple access
FileMaker, Inc. and Claris have been waging a war against Manage Database clutter for over two decades. In the early days of FileMaker, let's say FileMaker 3.0, there was no need to worry about packing too much into Manage Database because people weren't designing complex solutions like they do today. These days, it's critical that you use all the tools at your disposal and don't just cram everything into Manage Database. This article will serve as a history of why features were added to FileMak
Recently, having had a conversation with a fellow developer about a FileMaker theme potentially causing issues with slow performance, it was asked about how it's possible to update a theme.
Whether you simply want to update existing styles and/or remove and add others, there's only a few critical things you need to remember about updating and migrating a theme. If you can get those few things right, then making any number of updates to your existing theme can be quite easy to accomplish.
The g
Editor’s note: today we have a guest article by long-time FileMaker developer, Peter Doern, who has come up with an elegant, outside-the-box methodology for managing imports. This is one of the coolest techniques I’ve seen in a long time. Enjoy. FileMaker includes a powerful and fast method for importing data from a source table to… Continue reading FRAP-Map: A Flexible, Robust, Accessible and Portable Data Mapping Technique View the full article
Sometimes you need to send a document to be signed virtually. Integrating PandaDoc with your FileMaker solution makes this an easy task. PandaDoc has a robust API that allows you to create, send, and receive documents digitally using the functionality of your FileMaker system to manage the process. This guide will show you how you can begin sending documents. Includes a video and sample file. Read the full article here.
.fusion-gallery-1 .fusion-gallery-image {border:0px solid #f6f6f6;}One of these things is not like the others … One of these things is in a class of its own The Excelsior. It’s a tank, a rugby club, a Federation starship, a brewing company … and now, a digital “get-out-of-jail” card for New Yorkers. Launched this week, the Excelsior Pass is a mobile app that allows gate-keepers to verify a customer’s COVID-19 vaccination status prior to entering a people-populated place. Flash the pass and you,
We use our own app called Collector to manage our software development projects. A few years ago my colleague Milan started feeling the need to schedule our development capacity more precisely. So we created a detailed plan layout. In the following video you can see what the layout looked like and how we later optimized it using Web Viewer and JavaScript.
In the first version of the layout, we used a list view with 31 filtered portals in the body part and another 31 port
We have recently released fmRESTor 19 along with a brief 8-minute step-by-step video on how you can use fmRESTor to add a webhook to your own FileMaker database.
For the case you have not heard the term yet, webhook is usually defined as a “user-defined HTTP callback”. In plain English, it’s a web URL you can access and pass data to in order to perform some action in the target application. In the simplest form it’s just a link you can click and that alone performs the action.
FileMaker has had the ability to use an internal PDF writer since version 8. It has, however, not always had the ability to merge multiple PDFs into one master and make this work as seamlessly as possible. Being able to do this server side is a really BIG benefit!
In this video, we take a look at a subscriber's question about a particular printed layout issue in conjunction with taking advantage of FileMaker's best possible output options. With the ability to Save Records As PDF we can certainl
Need a PHP Wrapper to Connect to the FileMaker Data API?
Try FMXData!
by Duane Weller, eXcelisys FileMaker/Web Developer
I’ve built a number of FileMaker Custom Web Publishing (CWP) websites using the FileMaker Data API. With this eXperience I have learned that writing the PHP code to connect to the FileMaker Data API can be tedious and time-consuming. In order to eXpedite development, you need a library of simple, pre-built functions that give you easy access to the features of the FileMak
I've talked to other developers, read articles and even attended presentations on how to create multilingual FileMaker solutions. I've always thought to myself... "I'll never have to do this myself" so I only half listened. Now I have a client who needs multilingual field labels, titles, button text, tooltips and placeholders. I'm going to walk readers through the process of determining the best solution for my particular client so you can learn the way I did. You may have to adjust your approac
FileMaker themes are simply a collection of the popular CSS standards plus a few extra attributes which are FileMaker specific. Each element on your FileMaker layouts is defined by these CSS settings. They can be seen when extracting them from the clipboard, and if you know the right location to retrieve and store them, can be defined by any enthusiastic developer.
When FileMaker, now Claris, first introduced themes they likely had the intention of allowing users and/or third parties to create
