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Featured Entries

Hacking Your Own FileMaker Platform Solutions

By Steven H. Blackwell April 7, 2016

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
- 1 comment
- 4,962 views
A Conversation About '2 Factor Authentication'

By Josh Ormond February 8, 2016

[ 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
- 1 comment
- 5,114 views

FileMaker Pro 13 Tip-n-Trick: Easy-Bake FileMaker Pro 13 Audit Trail

<h3></h3> <h3>FileMaker Pro 13 Tip-n-nTrick: Easy-Bake FileMaker Pro 13 Audit Trail</h3> <p><em>By: Doug West</em></p> <p><span style="color: #000000;">There are many ways to implement audit logs in FileMaker Pro 13, but I’m always on the lookout for the method with the least overhead. If you don’t need separate records in another table for every field change, </span>then you can keep track of field changes using FileMaker 1

eXcelisys

June 26, 2014

SeedCode

FileMaker 13 Animated Slide Panels

A colleague was asking how to simulate a drawer effect in FileMaker where an animated slide panel appears to withdraw completely into the window edge. This is pretty easily done but there are a few tricks to keep in mind (below). Animated Slide Panels Download the demo file, based on the Invoices starter solution. Click “slide panel demo” in the header to show and hide the panel. Slide panel “closed” Slide panel “open” Here are some tips to get this working smoothly: The slide con

John Sindelar

June 24, 2014

Linear Blue

FileMaker Plugin Development

During my time at Linear Blue I have been introduced to the realms of FileMaker and what it offers. As I have been first and foremost a Web Developer FileMaker is new to me but at it’s heart it is by all accounts just a Database and those I am quite familiar with. Upon arriving... Source

Paul de Halle

June 18, 2014

Linear Blue

FileMaker Plugin Development

Paul de Halle

June 18, 2014

eXcelisys' Blog

FileMaker Pro 13 Tip-n-Trick: FileMaker Pro 13 Popover Close in One Script

Simple FileMaker Pro 13 Popover Close in One Script By: David Thorp Yes, this is a common nuisance. Although it depends on what you want to use it for. The intended use for popovers is what is commonly seen on iOS (and more and more websites are picking it up as time goes by) – for example the iCloud tabs and bookmarks popovers in iOS Safari. Eg. for bookmarks: You tap the bookmarks icon, it pops down a popover with the list of bookmarks in it, you choose one, and it goes away.

eXcelisys

June 12, 2014

eXcelisys' Blog

FileMaker Pro Tip-n-Trick: Using Remote Volumes to Host Files in FileMaker Server 13

<h2>Using Remote Volumes to Host Files in FileMaker Server 13</h2> <p><em>By Rob Poelking</em></p> <p>After a discouraging loss of work due to a virtual machine image crashing, I looked deeper into the FileMaker Server 13 user guide and discovered that FileMaker Server 13 is now supporting hosting files from a mounted network volume. You still cannot back up files to a remote volume but being able to serve from a remote folder would have saved my wor

eXcelisys

June 6, 2014

SeedCode

Perform Script On Server: Faster Calendars

Perform Script On Server (PSOS): Overview The “Perform Script on Server” script step was introduced in FileMaker Server 13 to let clients of a hosted file run scripts on the server. So with some careful planning, you can have the server do a lot of the heavy lifting the client machine would normally have to do (finding, sorting, processing, other data manipulation, etc.). This means you can sometimes avoid moving large amounts of data over the network, which is what normally happens when the cl

John Sindelar

June 3, 2014

Skeleton Key's Blog

Slate Mentions Open Book Management

<p><img src="/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/SlateOpenBookManagement1-295x300.jpg" /><br />Slate recently published a brief intro to the concept of Open Book Management. We have been practicing Open Book Management at Skeleton Key and our sister company, Brightsource IT, since 2009. Running "open book" has been a major factor in our success and it has become a huge part of our culture. We're fortunate to have a company made up of smart, passionate people. Open Book Management a

Skeleton Key

May 27, 2014

Skeleton Key's Blog

Join Us For App Spotlight: FileMaker At St. Louis Galleria June 4th

<p>Join us for App Spotlight: FileMaker — a special business event at the Apple Store, St.Louis Galleria on Wednesday, June 4th, 8:30am.<br /><img src="/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/AppSpotlight.png" /><br />FileMaker Pro and FileMaker Go make it easy for anyone to create custom business solutions for iPad and iPhone. At this event, presented by Mark Richman, learn how you can create a custom business solution for your business task. See how FileMaker apps running on iPad,

Skeleton Key

May 21, 2014

SeedCode

Schedules and Perfectionism

Schedules suck. Each time we make a schedule, we do so despite two glaring problems: 1. It’s really tough to estimate or forecast any substantial development project. (That’s the long version of “schedules are useless”.) Looking at any large successful software project in hindsight your estimates and schedules appear naive if not ridiculous 2. We also can’t deny that schedules themselves (or is it deadlines?) are a huge cause of stress. Assuming the wrong time scale causes a ton of stress, bu

John Sindelar

May 20, 2014

SeedCode

Hiding Objects & Flashing in Web Direct

If you’ve been building layouts for Web Direct you’ve likely seen that Web Direct may draw your objects before conditional formatting or hiding are applied. This never happens in the desktop, where rendering is now double buffered on both Mac and Windows, but it happens frequently in Web Direct. The video below shows this in action and suggests one technique to make it less obvious. The movie is taken from optimizing our Pro Calendar for Web Direct. We’re also rewriting SeedCode Complete for We

John Sindelar

May 19, 2014

Skeleton Key's Blog

Join Our FileMaker St. Louis User Group: FileMaker STL

<p><img src="/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Untitled-copy-300x83.jpg" /></p> <p>You are invited to join our local FileMaker User Group. This group is for experienced FileMaker Devs, FileMaker users who've poked around under the hood and want to dive into development, and anyone else who wants to learn more about FileMaker. We aim to cover general FileMaker development, advanced techniques, plugin integration, external data access, external tool integration, etc. It's reall

Skeleton Key

May 16, 2014

eXcelisys' Blog

FileMaker Pro Tips and Tricks: Moving Files Without a PlugIn

<h2 class="p1">Using FileMaker® Pro to move files without the use of a PlugIn!</h2> <h3>By Rob Poelking,</h3> <p> </p> <p class="p1">This FileMaker Pro tip and trick shows a simple method of moving a file natively using FileMaker Pro, and works on both Mac and the PC/Win platforms. No plugins required.</p> <p class="p1"><em>The idea for this Tip-n-Trick originated when building an updater that required files to be in a

eXcelisys

May 16, 2014

SeedCode

Minimize Flashing in Web Direct: do as little as possible

Since layout redraw is one of the slowest things a Web Direct (WD) layout can do, you’ll want to do whatever you can to minimize those redraws (which can appear your users as flashing or as a spinning busy icons). So, “do as little as possible”. This often means wrapping your commands in If() statements to see if they’re necessary. We don’t need to do this in Pro because we don’t notice things like “Revert Record” if they’re not needed. But in Web Direct, you really see Revert Record even if t

John Sindelar

May 12, 2014

eXcelisys' Blog

Excelisys is recognized as a FileMaker Business Alliance Platinum Member!

<p> </p> <div id="attachment_1129" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="http://developer.filemaker.com/search/platinum/?flag_platinum=1&country[0]=US&country[1]=CA&country[2]=MX" target="_blank"><img class="wp-image-1129 size-medium" src="http://www.excelisys.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/FBA_PLATINUM_4C-300x114.jpg" alt="Excelisys FBA platinum partner member" width="300" height="114" /></a><p

eXcelisys

May 9, 2014

SeedCode

Time Scales, Kaizen, and Urgency

Doing some financial planning a few months ago, I was thinking about how to budget for all the stuff we’re trying to get done next year–remodeling on the house, some travel, finishing the van/mobile-office/surf wagon–and I just couldn’t get the numbers to come out right. I had this spreadsheet showing how much we’d have available each quarter but it just wasn’t working. And I was getting pretty stressed out about it. But then I added 6 more months to my spreadsheet and everything balanced out.

John Sindelar

May 1, 2014

eXcelisys' Blog

FileMaker Pro Tips and Tricks – Setting Portal Color, By Rob Poelking

<p><strong>Setting Portal Color</strong>, By Rob Poelking</p> <p>Here is a little FileMaker Pro Tip and Trick… Have you tried setting the color or opacity of your portal object only to find that it doesn’t seem to take? That happened to me and it took looking at the CSS to realize that while my Portal object was set to clear, the portal row was set to opaque white. The portal background colors are controlled by 7 different styles: the portal ( normal, hover, press

eXcelisys

April 30, 2014

SeedCode

The FileMaker Web Viewer as a Javascript Calculation Engine (CSV to JSON example)

The FileMaker 13v2 update has generated a lot of excitement about the fmp: protocol now being available for running scripts in all deployment situations. Previously, locally running files handled the protocol differently than their Go and Hosted counterparts. This made some of us a little hesitant to use this powerful new technology. However, it’s not just the UI power from Javascript that we get, although that certainly is the jewel. We also get access to a rich library of data manipulation

John Sindelar

April 29, 2014

SeedCode

Schedules & Teams

I’ve been thinking a lot about schedules lately–software production schedules, deadlines, sprint plans, etc.–and I ran into this from my Pause On Error session 4 years ago: Below, I’ve proposed 8 “blockers” that, if true, seem to reinforce my skepticism that you can’t really share FileMaker development: that anything bigger than “one developer – one project – start to finish” starts to break down pretty quickly. 1. We have no accurate way to quantify the productivity of a developer. 2. Yet we

John Sindelar

April 23, 2014

Linear Blue

.fmp[x]Berlin

FileMaker zealot and all round good guy Egbert Friedrich is putting together the next European FileMaker Unconference, having previously run the successful Berlin PauseOnError in the past. The conference is open to one and all, across Europe and beyond. Berlin: 2nd – 4th June 2014 Where nhow Hotel, Stralauser Allee 3, 10245 Berlin Find out more here... Source

Paul de Halle

April 17, 2014

Linear Blue

WebDirect: Early Days for the IWP replacement …

The introduction of WebDirect at the expense of Instant Web Publishing has added a much enhanced toolset to the developers armoury. There are considerable improvements in function that can avoid the clunky, compromising and design limited results of an IWP solution. WebDirect offers the following specific feature improvements that are now supported where they were... Source

Paul de Halle

April 15, 2014

SeedCode

FileMaker Publishes Case Study featuring GoMaps and GoZync

“In our industry, we don’t get big game-changers very often.” – Jason Larson Jason Larson’s sweet mod of GoMaps for Braun Electric. We’re very psyched to see FileMaker, Inc. recognize Braun Electric’s very cool FileMaker Go deployment using GoMaps and GoZync. Read the full case study here. Learn more about the SeedCode add-ons used in this solution: GoMaps – plot your records on interactive, muti-pin google maps. Available for the desktop as ProMaps. GoZync – reliable, scriptable sync

John Sindelar

April 14, 2014

SeedCode

Run Your Own Scripts from Google Maps: fmp urls in FileMaker Pro

SeedCode’s ProMaps lets you add your own links to Google Maps: users can click on a pin and run your own FileMaker scripts–going to that pin’s record in your FileMaker layout, for example. While ProMaps could always do this for hosted files, FileMaker’s 13v2 update now lets scripts like these run locally, not just when your FileMaker file is hosted. Learn more and download a ProMaps demo to see how this works. If you haven’t downloaded the 13v2 update, you’ll want to do so now. This update ext

John Sindelar

April 8, 2014