The real magic happens when we bring AI into the workflow. Watch how a simple, conversational prompt can take raw FileMaker table data and instantly return a clean, well-structured Entity Relationship Diagram complete with proper field types, naming conventions, and primary and foreign key relationships. What used to require deep database expertise and hours of planning can now be done in minutes, and the results are often better than what you'd come up with on your own.

The full video goes deeper into optimization strategies, consolidating redundant tables, planning migrations from existing solutions, and leveraging modern technologies alongside FileMaker to build faster, more scalable systems. If you're serious about leveling up your FileMaker development, this is the kind of practical, real-world training you won't find anywhere else.

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In this video, I showcase how I created an IIFE (Immediately Invoked Function Expression), well AI did, that injects links into a web page, allowing direct interaction with FileMaker data. This approach to working with your FileMaker solution is incredibly powerful.

If you can run JavaScript against a web page loaded into a Web Viewer, you can do just about anything. The real trick is implementation. Once you can prompt AI to generate the code for you, you’re well on your way to expanding what your FileMaker solution can do inside any Web Viewer.

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Because OData supports all CRUD operations and does so without the same requirements as the Data API, such as requiring a layout, it becomes essential knowledge whether you are using a server, working in a serverless environment, building a microservice, or exploring other ways of interconnecting FileMaker.

For many hesitant adopters, this can mean learning a new technology, possibly purchasing new tools, and investing time to become familiar with how everything works. In this video, I take my existing knowledge of the foundational technology embedded within FileMaker and use it to create a very simple, easy to use solution for experimenting with OData.

As we work through the topics in this video, you will learn more than how to experiment with OData. You will also gain insight into how to explore and implement other critical web technologies as well.

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Things get more complicated when you also need to duplicate the associated related records. At that point, you typically have to “load” the related records, either with a Find or Go to Related Records script step, duplicate each one individually, and ensure the new primary key value is written into the foreign key field of every related record.

Once that’s complete, you return to the original layout and repeat the same process for every other related record set you want to duplicate. Automation can feel exciting at first. Watching the entire process run with a single button click is satisfying. That excitement fades, however, when you realize you need to rebuild the same logic again and again in new solutions. It may not happen constantly, but it happens often enough to be frustrating.

With more modern FileMaker development, we now have far more powerful options. The Execute FileMaker Data API script step allows us to duplicate complex sets of related records in dramatically fewer steps. In many cases, a process that once required extensive scripting can now be accomplished in as few as 15 script steps.

In this video, I walk through the modern approach to duplicating a primary record along with its related records in a fast and approachable way. The process is easy to update, and once implemented, it can be quickly adapted to other duplication scenarios. If you have an existing solution with a complex duplication process, I encourage you to explore what’s possible now. You may find you get far more value for the effort you invest.

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For those of us who have spent decades learning how to write code, this represents a significant shift. The value of manually composing code is decreasing, not because it is unimportant, but because AI can now generate functional code very quickly once it is given clear direction and constraints. The real value moves to defining the problem correctly and validating the results that AI produces.

AI is now capable of handling complex tasks, especially when it is allowed to access documentation, data, and external tools. Much of FileMaker development follows well understood patterns. Generating code is becoming a solvable problem. What remains critical is your ability to determine whether the generated code is correct, complete, maintainable, and appropriate for the business problem being solved.

As a result, the role of the FileMaker developer is evolving. The skills that matter most are architectural thinking, understanding data flow, validating edge cases, and ensuring performance and reliability. I now think of my role less as a coder and more as a software architect or business automation integrator.

How you create FileMaker solutions is going to change, especially if you have not yet used AI as part of your development process. In this video, we will look at how AI can be used to generate FileMaker code and what you may be experiencing in the very near future if you're not already there.

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In this video, I showcase the collection of window-related custom functions I’ve developed and refined over the years. These functions are organized using the new custom function folders feature introduced in FileMaker 22. We walk through how each function works and demonstrate practical techniques for positioning and managing windows precisely within your FileMaker solutions.

In addition, the video covers several FileMaker-specific window behaviors and how to work effectively with script steps such as Install OnTimer Script [ ]. Going further, we explore the use of window-specific variables, enabling you to manage state and data on a per-window basis for more robust and scalable solutions.

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This is where external technologies shine. Python handles complex mathematical operations with exceptional speed. JavaScript can process large datasets far more efficiently than a FileMaker custom function. And your data doesn’t always need to live inside the same tool you use to manage it. Sometimes, the most effective approach is to let FileMaker act as the connective layer, the glue-between so to say, of your specialized systems.

In this video, I walk through the integrations available with Amazon Web Services (AWS). In particular, DynamoDB. With AWS offering such an enormous range of services, far more than any one person can fully master, knowing even a few of them can give you valuable insight into when to offload tasks or data storage to a more suitable platform. If you’ve never explored options outside FileMaker for managing or storing your data, this video will give you a few more ideas to consider.

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In this part of our series, we’ll explore a helpful suite of custom functions which serves as a solid foundation for nearly anything related to dates and times in FileMaker. By storing these functions within our Launcher tool, we can easily copy and paste them into any other solution we build.

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In this video, I cover the External Data Sources feature. While this feature is primarily intended for connecting to external data sources, its utility goes beyond simply linking to an ODBC or JDBC source and displaying SQL data alongside information stored within FileMaker.

For our simple launcher program, we use this feature to launch FileMaker solutions. This approach lets us store any number of solutions in a table and easily filter or locate the one we need to launch. By taking advantage of the various path options in the External Data Sources dialog, we gain insight into several benefits of how the feature works.

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These early investments in your technical solution cover a variety of areas, one of the most important being permissions. Controlling what can be done, and by whom, not only protects against malicious intent from outside your organization but also helps prevent the inevitable accidental mishaps that occur internally.

This video begins laying the groundwork for implementing permissions properly when building FileMaker solutions. By setting a few initial configurations, we can encourage mindfulness about what happens as users navigate layouts and perform actions within the system. Following the process shown in the video allows us to be intentional about our permissions and to test them as we move forward along the development path.

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While adding a Users table will allow you to manage those users and their preferences, you might as well also add a Sessions table to track whatever you wish about user activity while they're logged in.

Often, the rush is to simply start solving the main problems the solution addresses. However, to build a successful multi-user solution, core features must be implemented first. These include user and session management, permissions, error handling, logging, and a few other critical elements.

In this video, we implement user and session management into a simple FileMaker solution launcher.

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It's probably no surprise that using a dedicated developer-only option, such as a debug menu, is one of the best ways to approach the problem.

In this video, we walk through the foundations of the debug menu I personally use in most of my solutions and discuss how it evolves and what elements it provides.

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While setting up and taking the time to familiarize yourself with and use shortcut keys may feel like a bit of a hassle, it's well worth the investment for the time it saves.

In this part of an ongoing series, we'll cover a highly effective method for managing your personal keyboard shortcut keys on macOS. We'll do it right within FileMaker itself, and we'll take the opportunity to explore how to manage preferences using the command-line tool defaults.

Once we've got our shortcut keys installed and working, the magic of time savings is what comes next.

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ABOUT THE SERIES

The Ultimate FileMaker Course is a walk-through of adding essential components found in pretty much any modern FileMaker solution. The course is based around building a useful tool for launching other FileMaker solutions.

By creating a launcher file, which provides full control over launching your other FileMaker solutions, you'll be treated to a variety of lessons around the various aspects of a successful FileMaker solution.

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ABOUT THE SERIES

The Ultimate FileMaker Course is a walk-through of adding essential components found in pretty much any modern FileMaker solution. The course is based around building a useful tool for launching other FileMaker solutions.

By creating a launcher file, which provides full control over launching your other FileMaker solutions, you'll be treated to a variety of lessons around the various aspects of a successful FileMaker solution.

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In this video, I'll present a number of custom functions that provide common and practical operations for handling lists of values. These functions can be copied and pasted directly into your FileMaker solution, offering a wide range of benefits.

Functions covered in this video:

• ValueExists
• ValuePosition
• ValuesExtract
• ValuesNotInList
• ValuesWalk
• ValuesWrap
• ValueToggle

We'll walk through each function and discuss how it's most commonly used within a FileMaker solution. Whether you've worked extensively with lists or only sparingly, these functions may change the way you approach handling values in your projects.

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For the longest time, we've relied on the Pause on Error checkbox to invoke the debugger when an error occurs. While useful, the constant pop-up of the debugger can quickly interrupt your development "flow" — and honestly, it gets a bit annoying.

Starting with FileMaker 18, we gained a new script step called Set Error Logging. When used effectively within your script call stack, this step can be a powerful tool. By integrating it properly, you can capture and pass along exactly the information you want when errors occur. Even better, if you're logging to a terminal window, you can add color to make the output easier to scan.

This video will walk you through one of the best methods for catching and analyzing errors while scripting your FileMaker solution.

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This can be achieved through either a global field relationship or a standard schema relationship. However, with the established method, if you want to store and reload a found set, you need a few additional elements: a Summary field (low overhead) and a dedicated relationship, which is always going to be required.

With the introduction of the new GetRecordIDsFromFoundSet() function in FileMaker 2025 (v22), this process becomes significantly easier.

Whether you’re recreating a simple found set or reconstructing a complex query using record ranges, this new function will help you streamline your solutions and reduce development overhead.

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Prior to FileMaker 22, if you applied either a button action (now discouraged) or a hide calculation, you had to ungroup the object before adding anything new to the group. This often caused problems: if you forgot to copy the calculation before ungrouping, you risked losing it and then had to reapply it after regrouping.

With the new enhancement, you can now add or remove elements from a group in multiple ways with no ungrouping required. This short video will walk you through the feature in detail.

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In this video, I take a look at the GetLiveText feature, introduced in version 19.5, which is supported on both macOS and iOS. If you’re using FileMaker Go or working with a large number of images, the GetLiveText functions can prove very useful.

Even if your deployment is primarily on Windows, a single Mac can serve as a processing agent to pick up images and perform some free OCR. If extracting text from images is something you need, be sure to check out this handy feature.

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While not particularly difficult to use, native charts come with some surprisingly powerful advantages. I recently had a project that called for a quick solution, and I was able to leverage a little-known trick that made native charts an exceptionally efficient choice.

If you need to visualize your data using any of FileMaker’s standard chart types, this short video might provide some new insights into just how useful native charts can be!

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In this short video, I focus on a few things you can do with the Open Quickly feature. From jumping to fields several tables away to managing multiple layouts while working on your design, adopting the Open Quickly feature can significantly speed up your development process.

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In this video and technique file, we take a look at just one of many ways to create a wizard-like, multi-step process. Using a slider is likely one of the simplest methods for collecting data from the end user. You could also use multiple layouts or even a clever single layout with multiple sub-summary parts.

With just two simple scripts and a few convenient techniques that eliminate the need to replicate buttons or text, you can use the methods shown in this video and file to easily integrate a slider wizard into any of your solutions.

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First, it adds "noise" to your data structure, making it harder to distinguish between actual data fields and those used for other purposes. For example, you might ask, "Is this an actual data field or is it used for something else?"

Second, FileMaker’s data transfer over the network is essentially all or nothing because every field in a table must be transferred. I've seen solutions with literally thousands of fields - every one of them, and their contents, is being sent over the wire.

This is not an ideal situation, but it can be easily mitigated by migrating to a system that addresses both issues. Furthermore, you can take additional steps to move this data just one table away and still maintain the same benefits for your user interface.

This video presents a modern approach to managing your user interface settings. By learning from it, you may also gain insights into other ways to use JSON in your development.

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One of my favorite tools is Typinator, which offers extensive text manipulation capabilities. Recently, a new tool for Mac developers was released that addresses the lack of a full-fledged editor. FMIndent, released by the well-respected Debi Fuchs from Aptworks, is a winner!

Adapting Perl code Debi created 20 years prior, we now have access to an OS-level tool that can format our code anywhere in FileMaker — or anywhere else on your computer for that matter.

With the power of Apple's Shortcuts app and the new FMIndent, you can absolutely format your code exactly as desired. If you like taking control over your code, give this video a watch. With the ability to post-process what FMIndent provides, there's little you can't do.

Special note about permissions: You may need to assign various levels of access to Shortcuts and the clipboard. As well as Allow Running Scripts within the Advanced area of Shortcut's settings.

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