FileMaker Hacks

User-Friendly Excel Exports, part 4

Colleagues and family members are starting to express concern at my obsessive refusal to bring this series to a close. But we’re getting close. Really. In fact, today, we’re going to look at two cool tricks (and one work around) which are utilized in this article’s demo file, excel exports, part 4, but that could [...] Source

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1,412 views

Kevin Frank
March 20, 201214 yr

User-Friendly Excel Exports, part 3

So far in this series we’ve been looking at exporting data to Excel from a single table (Contacts). Today we’re going to extend the technique to encompass a second, related table, Donations, and without too much trouble we can leverage existing work from earlier entries in this series (part 1, part 1.1 and part 2). [...] Source

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1,598 views

Kevin Frank
March 8, 201214 yr

User-Friendly Excel Exports, part 2

[Note: To avoid a huge amount of redundant repetition, this article assumes that you are familiar with part 1 and part 1.1 in this series.] Today we’re going to take a look at streamlining the approach introduced in part 1 by reducing clutter on the Relationships Graph, going from this… …to this, with no loss [...] Source

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1,454 views

Kevin Frank
February 25, 201214 yr

User-Friendly Excel Exports, part 1.1

Bruce Robertson emailed me off list with an improved version of my demo from part 1, excel exports, part 1.1, which I am sharing with his permission. The improvements are… a) live preview fields showing the data to be exported. an “Eval Error Tester” script to make sure the output code in the alias [...] Source

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1,469 views

Kevin Frank
February 20, 201214 yr

User-Friendly Excel Exports, part 1

Many end users appreciate FileMaker’s ability to export a found set of records in Excel format — it’s fast, straight-forward and empowering. One request that I have received from clients multiple times over the years is: make the exported field names in the top row of the spreadsheet “human-friendly”… For example, instead of this: …perhaps they [...] Source

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1,535 views

Kevin Frank
February 20, 201214 yr

Google Route Mapping, part 2

Those of you who attended DevCon 2011 in San Diego may recall meeting Andries Heylen of BH&A, who cheerfully answered questions in the FileMaker Genius Bar. Well, from the sow’s ear demo I posted in part 1, Andries has woven a silk purse (google-route-mapping-part-2), which I am sharing with his permission, and which uses Google [...] Source

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1,453 views

Kevin Frank
February 16, 201214 yr

Google Route Mapping

The other day someone asked a question on the FMP Experts list about plotting a driving route in Google Maps using FileMaker data. Mark Rubinstein posted a simple solution, and my reactions were, in this order: “No way, it can’t possibly be this easy; better build a demo (google-route-mapping) to find out; wow, it really [...] Source

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1,916 views

Kevin Frank
February 5, 201214 yr

GetAsDate Momentary Head-Scratcher

Recently I was doing some FileMaker training with my older son; we were looking at the “DayOfWeek” function in the data viewer, and I showed him that… DayOfWeek ( Date ( 1 ; 22 ; 2012 ) ) …returns a 1, since this particular date falls on Sunday, and FileMaker considers Sunday to be the [...] Source

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1,372 views

Kevin Frank
January 22, 201214 yr

Locating Matching Records, part 2

Have you ever right-clicked into a field (or Ctrl-clicked if on a Mac) and chosen Find Matching Records? It works remarkably well, but oddly enough, there is no scripted equivalent for this command. Of course if we do a Find Matching Records and then invoke Modify Last Find… …we can see what FileMaker is doing [...] Source

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1,292 views

Kevin Frank
January 15, 201214 yr

Locating Matching Records, part 1

Sometimes a seemingly-simple FileMaker challenge turns out to be more nuanced and educational than first impressions might indicate. This happened recently when I was asked to help make a scripted search behave properly. Most of the time, the existing routine worked correctly, but on certain records it would fail. The challenge: Click a button to [...] Source

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1,371 views

Kevin Frank
January 9, 201214 yr

Long Documents in FileMaker 11

There was a time, many years ago, when the maximum number of characters you could store in a FileMaker text field was 64,000. With the introduction of FileMaker 7 in 2004, that limit was expanded to approximately one billion characters (2 Gb of data divided by 2 bytes per Unicode character), i.e., more than you [...] Source

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1,263 views

Kevin Frank
December 17, 201114 yr

FileMaker 11 Internal SQL Changes, part 2

Welcome back for a second action-packed episode, as we continue exploring changes to the FileMaker 11 internal SQL parser. We ended part 1 by looking at the INSERT/SELECT construction which, as you may recall, provides the SQL equivalent of a FileMaker “add new records” import from one table to another. Actually, when you use INSERT/SELECT, [...] Source

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1,246 views

Kevin Frank
November 27, 201114 yr

FileMaker 11 Internal SQL Changes, part 1

March 9, 2010 is a date I recall quite clearly: not only was it the release date for FileMaker 11; it was also the day a bunch of my FileMaker SQL code broke, due to changes in the FM 11 internal SQL parser. If you’re new to this subject, or perhaps a bit rusty, I [...] Source

0 Comments
1,181 views

Kevin Frank
November 10, 201114 yr

Summary Report in a Filtered Portal

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 [...] Source

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1,145 views

Kevin Frank
October 18, 201114 yr

A Simple Backup Script

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 [...] Source

0 Comments
1,150 views

Kevin Frank
October 8, 201114 yr

Easy Sorting of List Views, part 3

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 [...] Source

0 Comments
1,077 views

Kevin Frank
October 1, 201114 yr

Easy Sorting of List Views, part 2

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 [...] Source

0 Comments
1,015 views

Kevin Frank
September 22, 201114 yr

Easy Sorting of List Views, part 1

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 [...] Source

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1,041 views

Kevin Frank
September 18, 201114 yr

Birthday Challenges, part 2

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 [...] Source

0 Comments
1,044 views

Kevin Frank
September 8, 201114 yr

Birthday Challenges, part 1

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 [...] Source

0 Comments
1,005 views

Kevin Frank
September 7, 201114 yr

FileMaker Hacks

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Entries in this blog

User-Friendly Excel Exports, part 4

User-Friendly Excel Exports, part 3

User-Friendly Excel Exports, part 2

User-Friendly Excel Exports, part 1.1

User-Friendly Excel Exports, part 1

Google Route Mapping, part 2

Google Route Mapping

GetAsDate Momentary Head-Scratcher

Locating Matching Records, part 2

Locating Matching Records, part 1

Long Documents in FileMaker 11

FileMaker 11 Internal SQL Changes, part 2

FileMaker 11 Internal SQL Changes, part 1

Summary Report in a Filtered Portal

A Simple Backup Script

Easy Sorting of List Views, part 3

Easy Sorting of List Views, part 2

Easy Sorting of List Views, part 1

Birthday Challenges, part 2

Birthday Challenges, part 1

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