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FileMaker Magazine

A blog by FileMaker Magazine in Affiliate Blogs

  • Entries

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Entries in this blog

FM Devcon 2016 - Designing in Tight Spaces

In July of 2016, Matt was afforded the opportunity to present as a speaker at the annual FileMaker Developer's Conference. FileMaker Inc. decided to make the release of the session videos available for the general public. The session was well received with high marks given all around. The session was a jam-packed roundup all the various things you can do with FileMaker layout objects in order to meet the objective of creating designs which work well within a small form factor. If taking advanta

FM Devcon 2016 - Designing in Tight Spaces

In July of 2016, Matt was afforded the opportunity to present as a speaker at the annual FileMaker Developer's Conference. FileMaker Inc. decided to make the release of the session videos available for the general public. The session was well received with high marks given all around. The session was a jam-packed roundup all the various things you can do with FileMaker layout objects in order to meet the objective of creating designs which work well within a small form factor. If taking advanta

Better Portal Interactions

In FileMaker, if we only had list and form views for viewing data, then we’d probably be just fine. But, who wants to just get by with a minimal set of methods for viewing data? The ever valuable portal provides a wonderful view into whatever data you wish to show. It can be related data, menu options, a list of users or pretty much anything. Especially, when using a portal as a Virtual List of something being held within a $$GLOBAL.VARIABLE. The key thing to understand about portals is that F

Better Portal Interactions

In FileMaker, if we only had list and form views for viewing data, then we’d probably be just fine. But, who wants to just get by with a minimal set of methods for viewing data? The ever valuable portal provides a wonderful view into whatever data you wish to show. It can be related data, menu options, a list of users or pretty much anything. Especially, when using a portal as a Virtual List of something being held within a $$GLOBAL.VARIABLE. The key thing to understand about portals is that F

Working with Relative Date Ranges

Working with dates within FileMaker isn’t as complex as working on launching a rocket to the moon. But, as with most all technical things, it’s always good to know what’s going on under the hood. Knowing how things work allows you to implement the desired solution in the most efficient manner. When talking about relative dates we’re talking about “Today”, “Tomorrow” and “Last Year”, not 7/6/1996. You can always instruct FileMaker to lookup a date range based on the whole year of 1995, but isn’t

Working with Relative Date Ranges

Working with dates within FileMaker isn’t as complex as working on launching a rocket to the moon. But, as with most all technical things, it’s always good to know what’s going on under the hood. Knowing how things work allows you to implement the desired solution in the most efficient manner. When talking about relative dates we’re talking about “Today”, “Tomorrow” and “Last Year”, not 7/6/1996. You can always instruct FileMaker to lookup a date range based on the whole year of 1995, but isn’t

Using OnGestureTap

With FileMaker Pro, the application has become so much more complex than its humble beginnings. There are so many areas and aspects which you may not use until you see a good idea about how they can be used. In this video, I showcase the Layout script trigger named OnGestureTap. It was introduced when FileMaker 13 was released along with FileMaker Go. The trigger only applies to clients which support it, which is primarily FileMaker Go on iOS and FileMaker Pro when running on a Windows compatib

Using OnGestureTap

With FileMaker Pro, the application has become so much more complex than its humble beginnings. There are so many areas and aspects which you may not use until you see a good idea about how they can be used. In this video, I showcase the Layout script trigger named OnGestureTap. It was introduced when FileMaker 13 was released along with FileMaker Go. The trigger only applies to clients which support it, which is primarily FileMaker Go on iOS and FileMaker Pro when running on a Windows compatib

Writing Complex FileMaker Calculations

When you’re faced with creating a complex piece of FileMaker code, you often break the larger problem into smaller parts. It’s always easier to tackle smaller portions of a larger problem. Even when it doesn’t seem like the problem should be that big. In this video, you’ll discover a lot of good information about how to break a larger problem down into its smaller parts. The problem being solved is extracting all the individual pieces of a US mailing address. There are so many various methods o

Writing Complex FileMaker Calculations

When you’re faced with creating a complex piece of FileMaker code, you often break the larger problem into smaller parts. It’s always easier to tackle smaller portions of a larger problem. Even when it doesn’t seem like the problem should be that big. In this video, you’ll discover a lot of good information about how to break a larger problem down into its smaller parts. The problem being solved is extracting all the individual pieces of a US mailing address. There are so many various methods o

Pill Menu Button Bars

I can’t recall a situation where some technology from the past isn’t superseded by the new technology which replaces it. In the context of FileMaker Pro, a good example of this is your basic button. Yes, it’s been there ever since FileMaker was created. There never was a FileMaker Pro without the button widget. Enter FileMaker 14 and Button Bars and we now have a lot of possible options. Especially when you combine the Hide object calc which arrived in FileMaker 13. You can control which segmen

Pill Menu Button Bars

I can’t recall a situation where some technology from the past isn’t superseded by the new technology which replaces it. In the context of FileMaker Pro, a good example of this is your basic button. Yes, it’s been there ever since FileMaker was created. There never was a FileMaker Pro without the button widget. Enter FileMaker 14 and Button Bars and we now have a lot of possible options. Especially when you combine the Hide object calc which arrived in FileMaker 13. You can control which segmen

Real Time Image Cropping

FileMaker Pro is always advancing its collection of tools in order to accomplish more and more every day tasks. It provides default widgets such as tab panels and sliders and offers useful functions such as GetThumbnail() for resizing images. GetThumbnail, however, will only get you so far. It will only resize an image to another size and provides no functionality regarding the manipulation of that image in any other way. This is where you need to turn to either a plug-in or JavaScript within a

Real Time Image Cropping

FileMaker Pro is always advancing its collection of tools in order to accomplish more and more every day tasks. It provides default widgets such as tab panels and sliders and offers useful functions such as GetThumbnail() for resizing images. GetThumbnail, however, will only get you so far. It will only resize an image to another size and provides no functionality regarding the manipulation of that image in any other way. This is where you need to turn to either a plug-in or JavaScript within a

FileMaker REST using BaseElements Plugin

REST (Representational state transfer) has quickly become the de facto standard for communication between services and apps. Before it, came SOAP and XMLRPC, but the two buzzwords you’ll hear over and over these days are REST and JSON. When it comes to FileMaker, you’ve always been able to do super basic REST with the Insert from URL script step. Later down the road, FileMaker added in support for the POST method of service interaction with the httpspost:// url scheme. While the basics are alw

List View Record Jumping

When developing your solutions for users, you can’t always account for how easy they think things should work. You do your best, but without user testing, they’re essentially stuck with what you initially create. You can, however, put in features which you think will make usability more convenient for them. Many times, these convenience features can be a bit complicated to implement. Fortunately, with more recent versions of FileMaker, the task of adding in such features has become much easier.

Capturing data with Google Forms

One of FileMaker’s best advantages is its ability to quickly provide an interface to common data tasks. Sorting, filtering and analysis, via automated routines, make a database system better suited to routine tasks. Primarily, because you can control the user interface. Typically, spreadsheet users don’t think in terms of disjointed data. Boiling data down into a relational model is something which takes a bit of patience and know-how. Data collection, however, is easily done within a spreadshe

Dynamic Record Tagging

One of the best parts of developing within FileMaker Pro is that you don’t need to create every single thing from scratch. For example, having a Popover widget at the ready for immediate use in any layout is a really big benefit. It’s an automatic space saver. However, what FileMaker doesn’t have built-in are certain features you might expect in most modern day software. How about a tagging feature which allows users to tag records and find those records on demand. This is something which isn’

Product Review of FMPerception

FileMaker Database analysis has been around since the days when FileMaker made its meta data available through its Database Design Report - or DDR for short. The report, for as long as I can recall, has been available in the human readable HTML format and also in the machine language format of XML. Various developers have always made use of this verbose collection of tidbits about a database, but none have made it as fast as FMPerception. This newly released database analysis tool is the faste

Developer Time Savers

When you’re in the “zone” while developing, it feels really good to get stuff done. You feel like you’re “flow”-ing through the problems and simply knocking them out one by one. That feeling which comes from achieving “flow” is often hard to have when you hit situations where you feel like you’re being hindered by the environment or a lack of knowledge. Having to stop for research or fumbling through the development environment is one of those necessary evils. It’s the learning part that takes

(Re)Theming Solutions

As FileMaker Inc adds new features and functionality to FileMaker, it’s really easy for older projects to start to feel like they’re aging pretty quickly. Fortunately, one of the easiest fixes to make is to give things a brand new look and feel. The process, however, of going about a re-theming isn’t always as easy as it seems. You’ve got new layout objects which may have been added and there are a ton of “older tricks” which may be replaced with newer ways of doing things. Without going down

Native Responsive Text Objects

Nothing screams responsive more than text which grows or shrinks based on the device upon which it’s being viewed. The sad part of the previous statement is that FileMaker does not provide a native way of doing this. There’s no Conditional Formatting which says when Get ( WindowContentWidth ) > 768 scale the font size by 120%. There is, however, a quaint little trick you can do with a few of FileMaker’s native functions along with a powerful Custom Function named CustomList. When you know ho

Using Utility Scripts

Learning how to efficiently create scripts within FileMaker is a never ending process. It's a balance of leveraging what you know and mixing in newly added features along with new ways of doing things. Optimization and cleanup will always be part of the ever growing software solution. In this video, I present the topic of using utility scripts in order to save precious development time. You know, those reusable scripts which prevent you from writing unique and dedicated scripts for every possib

FileMaker 15 Released

FileMaker 15 was released on May 10th 2016 and includes a few key new technologies. While much of the focus was on the mobile end of things, there are some speed improvements along with some convenience features which will make working in FileMaker 15 just a bit more enjoyable! You can Watch the HD version on YouTube FileMaker Inc. released version 15 on May 10th. Did you miss the news? If so, then here’s a video which goes through the shortlist of new features. One of the biggest changes wa

iOS Drill Down Sliders

As software users become more and more familiar with various UX methods, it becomes more and more desirable to emulate those methods within your FileMaker solutions. Common patterns such as tab panels and scrolling lists are a piece of cake and native to FileMaker. Some of the more recent implementations are simple and super easy, like Popovers for example. However, other implementations can be a bit complex and require those ever necessary bits of deep knowledge about how FileMaker works behin

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