Welcome to our community, full of great ideas on developing your FileMaker solutions effectively,
for peer-to-peer support of the FileMaker Platform and related products and services.
Author’s note: Inevitable comparisons will be drawn between the new While function and the venerable CustomList custom function, which I wrote about at length several years ago. Preliminary testing indicates that CustomList is faster under certain circumstances and While is faster under others. In my opinion, both of them belong in your developer tool kit. […]
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The FileMaker Let function is your tool to make a calculation readable, well formatted and easy to debug. Let us discuss how it can be used.
The post Like a Boss: Let us Discuss the FileMaker Let Function appeared first on Geist Interactive.
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[ 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
Hi all,
Today I'm happy to announce the release of Elemental for FileMaker. This is a free fully unlocked solution containing some cool user interface and design stuff that I hope you find useful and can incorporate into your own solutions.
You can grab a copy now at https://www.elemental-fm.com
In Elementals first version you'll find the following:
Avatars
Over 20 API integrations with avatar generators. These are uniquely generated based on a name y
The FileMaker Script Debugger is powerful. Its features are often overlooked. In this post we examine the buttons that control stepping through a script.
The post Like a Boss: Using the Script Debugger to its Full Potential appeared first on Geist Interactive.
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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Displaying a long list of items on a layout generally means that the majority of the list is hidden from the user until they click into the field, with no feedback as to the size of the list. This article details a nice technique you can use to present the same list in a truncated style that gives live feedback on the number of items.
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Here is a short video showing how we’re collapsing GoZync’s left hand side bar as you rotate your iPad.
For another gorgeous example of this technique, and more details, check out Yann Liqueur-Salzedo’s work here.
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In the final part of this two part series, we go into a little more detail about the aggregate technique we developed in the first article. We also carry out a number of comparison aggregate tests and present the results. We also try to address some of the limitations of this technique and ways in which you could try to work around these…
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In the first of a two part series, we begin the search for a faster way to perform aggregates in FileMaker. We cover why aggregates can be quite a costly operation - especially on wide area networks - and use that as a jumping off point for finding a faster method.
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July 26th 2011
Did You Hear What I Said?
By
Steven H. Blackwell
News media on both sides of the Atlantic were all agog last week over the alleged hacking of cellular phone voice mail accounts of politicians and crime victims by reporters of the now defunct News of the World tabloid. These are serious matters, and much of the coverage has been appropriately professional. Other media coverage however can be characterized in my view as lurid and as having an undertone of “Lo
For anyone heading to the show, we’ve published the DevCon Schedule out to Google Calendar:
https://www.google.com/calendar/ical/u7govide9q9ihq3al95gm7ja4o%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics
From FileMaker, via Zulu of course.
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To attend or not to attend? That’s the question I am asking myself every year since 2002 when I attended my first FileMaker DevCon. I have attended 8 DevCons so far, and skipped one. I have identified the following 5 possible reasons for not attending:
Attending DevCon costs a lot of money
Traveling to DevCon costs a lot of money
Staying at DevCon's location costs a lot of money
Going to DevCon takes a lot of time when I cannot do my regular work
The sessions
Everyone is excited about Lion. Even though many new features on Mac OS X 10.7 are giving us improvements we kept asking for since 10.1, Apple has again succeeded in giving all the new features the strong essence of innovation that makes us unable to hesitate to install and try Lion out as soon as we are able to.
But we are also afraid. What if some important apps stop working?
Read more in my article. Alredy updated with links to other resources and opinions...
Navigation of portals in FileMaker is a pretty simple affair, you either have a scrollbar, or you don't. In this article we demonstrate another way to navigate portals using a pagination style. We also demonstrate how it can be implemented at the relationship level, or the portal level using filtering.
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Back Me Up, Don’t Take Me Out, Are You Never Gonna Do That?
--By--
Steven H. Blackwell
June 13th 2011
Well, with apologies to Emilia De Poret, this adaptation of her hit song’s title pretty well describes the system and process of FileMaker Pro file backups.
Most all developers and IT Administrators who design or manage FileMaker solutions and deploy them in conjunction with FileMaker Server understand that a good backup system is absolutely one of several major requirement
In part one, we built a basic navigation bar made from repeating fields. In this followup article we take the formatting of the navigation bar further by introducing highlights. We also adjust the construction of the navigation, and introduce a custom menu implementation that can be used in conjunction with, or in place of the navigation bar.
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When FileMaker sorts records it happens on the client machine. Consequently, sorting can be a very painful process for users over a slow connection to a database. In this article we show a very fast way in which records can be presented to the user in descending creation order, without sorting delays...
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…are great. Of course. And necessary. Of course. Too often i spend time and energy railing against the powers that be to change their application/service/website to meet my individual needs. “This app should let me do this! Why doesn’t it? Will there be an update to address this? I should write support and have them fix it.”
Okay, i’ll let you all in on what i’m talking about. We use Google Apps here at Wing Forward. I’m sure we’re not alone in this. Google Docs, in particular, is a
…are great. Of course. And necessary. Of course. Too often i spend time and energy railing against the powers that be to change their application/service/website to meet my individual needs. “This app should let me do this! Why doesn’t it? Will there be an update to address this? I should write support and have them fix it.”
Okay, i’ll let you all in on what i’m talking about. We use Google Apps here at Wing Forward. I’m sure we’re not alone in this. Google Docs, in particular, is a
The Power and Advantages Of External Server Authentication With FileMaker Server
By
Steven H. Blackwell
May 9th 2011
Since the advent of FileMaker® Server 7 in 2004, FileMaker developers have been able to employ External Server Authentication for controlling Identity and Access Management to FileMaker files when hosted by FileMaker Server. Yet, either from lack of knowledge or from incorrect assumptions about the process, many do not employ this powerful option.
In this article the term "self-aware window" refers to a FileMaker window that can know in real-time whether or not it is the currently selected window, and act accordingly. We introduce a technique for allowing individual windows to calculate this, and some examples of what windows could do with that knowledge.
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In this article I demonstrate how you can use image maps with web viewers in FileMaker. In doing so, you can display images that, when clicked, can report the coordinate chosen back to FileMaker to handle in whichever manner you wish…
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Permissive Versus Restrictive Privileges In FileMaker Pro Databases
—By—
Steven H. Blackwell
April 25th 2011
In older versions of FileMaker Pro, those prior to FileMaker® Pro 7, privileges were, by default, permissive. This means that users were allowed to perform all actions by default. With the introduction of the modern versions of the FileMaker Family of Products, with their appropriate focus and attention to industry standards in the security realm, the default privile
Using an auto-enter calculation on a field is a great way to populate its contents when other fields are modified, including itself. But what do you do if you want to use a calculation that references itself without having it trigger its own auto-enter calculation? The answer lies in thinking outside the calculation....
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