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Blogs

Featured Entries

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
- 5,553 views
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
- 5,508 views

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

Kevin Frank

December 17, 2011

Performance Tuning

Marvelous Optimization #3 – Faster Imports

This example demonstrates that even a single-step script can be optimized. You just have to think a little bit out of the box… I was showing this as a surprise in my session Marvelous Optimizations at Pause On Error [x] London 2011. I used a sample file with 25 fields and 5,000 records and imported these records 5 times in a row in just 13 seconds. OK, 13 seconds is not bad but what if you need to import data into FileMaker Go over network? If you want to know how I imported the same data i

HOnza in Performance Tuning

December 12, 2011

Skeleton Key - FileMaker Training or Coaching?

FileMaker Training or Coaching? Training or coaching - which is right for you? The simple answer: Training is an overarching effort to teach you how to effectively use the FileMaker toolkit. Coaching is a more tactical approach that focuses on learning how to apply the FileMaker toolkit to your specific application. Here's an analogy that might make the distinction easier to grapple with: read more Source

Skeleton Key

December 9, 2011

Skeleton Key - Selling FileMaker App Dev Services - Tactical Steps to Improve Your Sales Funnel

Tactical Steps to Improve Your Sales Funnel Last week, I wrote about the theory behind these sales tactics. You should review that first if you're interested. The key is being able to identify an ideal prospect and 'know' who you are communicating with. There's a simple way to determine a qualified lead from an unqualified lead: ask the people involved. Now let's figure out how to ask. read more Source

Skeleton Key

November 29, 2011

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

Kevin Frank

November 27, 2011

Skeleton Key - Selling FileMaker App Dev Services - Invest Time On Leads That Will Become Sales

Invest Time On Leads That Will Become Sales <p>I may be crazy for publishing this but we're putting our money where our mouth is. Skeleton Key advocates for transparent business practices. Have a look around our site and you'll see it everywhere. I'm going to pull the curtain back on our sales process. If that makes you uncomfortable, you have all the more reason to keep reading. read more Source

Skeleton Key

November 21, 2011

Skeleton Key - Angelbeat St. Louis: Apple in the Enterprise

Skeleton Key - Angelbeat St. Louis : Apple in the Enterprise Oliver Block, Systems Analyst and VP at Skeleton Key, joined expert speakers from industry giants such as Google, Symantec, VMware, Microsoft and Aruba Networks to speak at the Angelbeat seminar in Clayton, Missouri yesterday. Oliver's presentation, entitled Apple In The Enterprise, covered best practices for integrating Apple Mac computers into enterprise networks. Oliver also provided tips for deploying and managing Apple mo

Skeleton Key

November 16, 2011

Printing Records With Different Output Designs

Most of the time when we print records in FileMaker, the output of every record appears pretty much the same, with similar formatting and design. But what if we want records to print with a completely different output design depending on the type of record? In this article we detail some of the various ways in which this can be achieved, and the pros and cons of each method… Read the Full Article Here…

Daniel Wood

November 15, 2011

Performance Tuning

Marvelous Optimization #2

The second example I was showing in my session Marvelous Optimizations at Pause On Error [x] London 2011 was the script for selecting Random Set of Records. I found this example in the FileMaker Knowledge Base and optimized it to run at least 158 times faster when selecting 10 random records out of 50,000. This version of the example has FM Bench Detective script steps included to measure the original and the optimized script more precisely. Watch the video recorded at Pause On Error below

HOnza in Performance Tuning

November 11, 2011

Performance Tuning

Marvelous Optimization #1

This is the first example I was showing in my session Marvelous Optimizations at Pause On Error [x] London 2011. I already wrote about this optimization some time ago. It’s the one that led me to unveil the Marvelous Optimization Formula. You can find the original article here: FileMaker Script Execution Time Cut From 5 Hours To 6 Seconds I simply took the example and added FM Bench Detective into it to be able to exactly measure and examine what happens in the slow and the optimized script

HOnza in Performance Tuning

November 11, 2011

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

Kevin Frank

November 10, 2011

Virtual List

A lot of folks have been asking for the Virtual List example file we put together with Bruce Robertson, so here it is: VirtualList.zip This Virtual List technique is part of what make our Calendar fast, and allows FMSearchResults to show records from different tables in the same ‘portal’. We demonstrated some applications of this at DevCon’s Year in Review in 2010 and 2011, showing how this can really speed up FileMaker displays, especially those formatted as columns, grids, or lists. Tod

John Sindelar

November 5, 2011

Calendar as Dashboard

We have a small subset of customers who wire their calendars up to act as dashboards on big displays. I’ve always thought this was cool and someday hope to get around to making one for SeedCode, a la the great dashboard at Panic. One of these customers asked for something pretty cool today: they wanted to be able to cycle through the different resources on the calendar (recording studios in her system), showing each one on the week view for a few seconds, before moving to the next studio autom

John Sindelar

November 4, 2011

Skeleton Key - FileMaker Number Functions Video Series

FileMaker Number Functions Video Series Last week we featured a series of five (5) videos from our Certified FileMaker Developer, Chad Adams, on our Facebook and Twitter social media profiles. He created these videos to both compliment a series of Text Function videos he did earlier this year, and to offer as a supplemental resource for other developers and/or novice FileMaker users. Chad chose to cover these particular Number Functions because they are ones that he uses most often, and t

Skeleton Key

October 28, 2011

A Different Perspective On Recently Released FileMaker, Inc. How To Paper Regarding External Authentication Configuration

A Different Perspective On Recently Released FileMaker, Inc. How To Paper Regarding External Authentication Configuration By Wim Decorte and Steven H. Blackwell I am pleased to have as co-author of this BLOG posting the renown and exceptionally highly regarded “developer’s developer” Wim Decorte. FileMaker, Inc. recently published a FileMaker How To article entitled Replicating an External Authentication Environment for Develop

Steven H. Blackwell

October 26, 2011

Support Diaries

Sometimes the hard stuff turns out to be really easy. It always impresses me that Jason has a way of finding the simplest ways of doing things. For example, when iCal treats a holiday as an all day event, SeedCode can pick that up as a two-day event. A customer asked about how to work around this, changing the iCal parser in SeedCode Calendar Pro. Jason sent them this screen shot showing how you can more easily teach SeedCode to ignore the end date of the holiday calendar, after the iCal eve

John Sindelar

October 26, 2011

Skeleton Key - West Coast FMPug Tour Guest Speaker Jason Thomas on Sales

West Coast FMPug Tour Guest Speaker Jason Thomas on Sales This week, the Skeleton Key office will sacrifice the physical presence of our beloved head of sales – Jason Thomas – as he travels to the West Coast to speak to enthusiastic Jason’s topic is Sales. His goal is to expand awareness of the need for a sales process while leveraging the expertise that already resides within both the in-house developer and consultant communities. He hopes to provide new knowledge, and improve attendees

Skeleton Key

October 24, 2011

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

Kevin Frank

October 18, 2011

What’s next for GoZync: Worx

This weekend, Todd Geist and I took the train up from LA for a 33 hour code sprint and built the start of Worx, the next file for GoZync. This is a great way to work and we got a ton done. Todd on the Coast Starlight Worx is a work orders system for iPad: users in the office assign orders to technicians and those techs “zync” the orders down to their iPads before completing the orders. Orders come down with contact info, maps, and a serious items database capable of browsing and selecti

John Sindelar

October 18, 2011

Examples & Tutorials

Debugging Scripts by Writing to Event.log - Secret Script Step Revealed

This is a fresh story of me spending hours trying to fix a technical issue and accidentally revealing a gold nugget. A few days ago one of my nightly server-side scripts stopped working without any apparent reason. But when I tried to run the script in FileMaker Pro it worked just fine. I really needed a way to debug the script on the server. Read more here

HOnza in Examples & Tutorials

October 17, 2011

Skeleton Key - The Positive Effect

Skeleton Key - The Positive Effect Marketing – be it 'traditional', word-of-mouth, grassroots or social media based, is not new for me. Marketing for Skeleton Key, a service-driven, Custom Application Development/Information Technology Consulting company is relatively new for me. My adventure began in mid-January... In order to promote and solidify the Skeleton Key (SK) brand to the widest-reaching audience and business consumers of FileMaker software, I had to learn to understand wha

Skeleton Key

October 15, 2011

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

Kevin Frank

October 8, 2011

Integrating Kiosk Mode into your Solution

Kiosk mode is a cool way to run a FileMaker database in a full screen environment where users are prevented from accessing the other functionality of the operating system. But what if you have a normal FileMaker solution and wish to use kiosk functionality in certain areas only? In this article we illustrate how a typical FileMaker solution can be enhanced with a kiosk component for carrying out certain actions. We use the article example file to help illustrate this. We also give some inf

Daniel Wood

October 7, 2011