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Blogs

Featured Entries

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
- 5,515 views
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
- 5,557 views

Database Discovery & Intelligence

In the world of software development, there are few tools you simply can't live without. A debugger is the first which comes to mind; because no one gets their code exactly perfect the first time. Plus, it's always a matter of figuring things out until they work as expected or desired. There are also those "other" tools which you can't really live without. ESPECIALLY, if you're working with a solution file which was created by someone other than yourself! When you need to discover what the heck

FileMaker Magazine

August 20, 2021

Set Variable By Name Re-Revisited

Demo files: set-var-by-name-v4 and set-var-by-name-md5 Background This is a quick follow up to last December’s Set Variable By Name Revisited, and to avoid repetition will assume the reader is familiar with the material that was presented in that article. But to briefly recap: 1. FileMaker does not provide an obvious way to programatically name a… Continue reading Set Variable By Name Re-RevisitedView the full article

Kevin Frank

August 20, 2021

Design

Prominent Color Coolness

In this article we show you how to use the contents of a FileMaker container field to produce beautiful gradients and solid background fills based on the container images most prominent colors. We also show how to render solid fills without the use of a web viewer (for portal display) and how to determine optimal color for text placed on top of your background fills. As always, an example file has been lovingly crafted to help you explore these techniques You can read the article

Daniel Wood in Design

August 18, 2021

Better Drop-down Lists

Oh the pain of a slow rendering layout! The other day I came across a painfully slow layout which was literally CRAWLING. It reminded me of one of my own situations where I needed to create a solution for some type of creative data input. This, of course, was based on FileMaker's input limitations between two types of fields. The choice of using a Drop-down list over a Pop-up menu field style was based on the type of input being managed. I didn't want the forced interaction of having to click,

FileMaker Magazine

August 11, 2021

Video: FileMaker Server on Docker

FileMaker on Linux / Docker – Presentation at Kentuckiana Developers Group A few weeks ago, Jonathan Fletcher was kind enough to invite Romain Dunand (@airmoi) and I (@FabriceN) to do a presentation at his Kentuckiana Developers Group. Discover all the possible ways of hosting FileMaker databases The topic was a comparison of all possible ways to host a FileMaker database, from local server to Virtual Private Server, to, of course, our fmcloud.fm Linux/Docker solution. If you want to unders

fabriceN

August 5, 2021

Storing Secured Information

Every once in a while you need to store something with an extra bit of security. Maybe it's a password or some super secret text with a winning stock market strategy. Whatever it is, you don't just want to rely on the authentication, privilege set and possible EAR (encryption at rest) on the file. You want to store the data itself with even that much more security. By encrypting it with CryptEncryptBase64() of course! The trick is this. How do you capture that data, before it's written to the d

FileMaker Magazine

July 30, 2021

DataTables Deep Dive - Replacing Portals - Part 2

This is Part 2 of a series about using the DataTables JavaScript library in order to simply pull data you wish to display and doing so within a Web Viewer. While standard FileMaker Portals present one of the easiest methods for showing related data, it's now a viable option to simply use a Web Viewer to present data to the user. With the bi-directional support of JavaScript within FileMaker 19 and higher we can take advantage of what JavaScript does best - being fast! In this video we focus sp

FileMaker Magazine

July 21, 2021

DataTables Deep Dive - Replacing Portals - Part 1

Portals and list views represent one of the biggest reasons for using a database for managing data. You can view the data in a myriad of ways and FileMaker provides the tools to modify the views quite easily. FileMaker's list view happens to be the most powerful when compared to portals. We don't really have the same feature set presented within a portal. Using a portal it's an all or nothing approach to sorting by default and you can't really search the portal contents. You can certainly hack

FileMaker Magazine

July 21, 2021

PSOS – Run Script in File not open Locally

INTRODUCTION Today I want to take a look at a certain Perform Script On Server (PSOS) behavior, and for those who find this behavior to be inconvenient, propose a work around. Here’s the behavior, or misconception, actually: a server side script initiated via PSOS (apparently) cannot access files on the server unless the user already… Continue reading PSOS – Run Script in File not open LocallyView the full article

Kevin Frank

July 14, 2021

Scripted Change Log

Scripting a change log table has been around since script triggers were introduced in FileMaker 10. But, do you know the right way to script a field modification log? I've been programming them for years and have gone through every version of them and have settled on what I'm going to cover today. We'll start off with the wrong way to script an event log so you can get some perspective but will end up with a dynamic solution that can be copied and pasted from FileMaker file to FileMaker file.Vie

John Mark Osborne

July 13, 2021

Formatting Date, Time & Timestamp Values

What's the easiest way to format a FileMaker date, time or timestamp value? Using a custom function? Maybe... In this video, I'll show you a unique trick for getting a formatted date, time or timestamp value without using a Custom Function or any of FileMaker's Date or Time functions. Of course, I'll also provide you with one of the better custom functions for formatting date/time/timestamp values. The custom function in this technique file handles pretty much all possible variations of date/t

FileMaker Magazine

July 8, 2021

UI Portal Enhancements

Anyone can just throw everything they need within a portal. Adding a new field? Just throw it in the portal. But WAIT! The question is "Should you?". The fine art of determining what should end up in your portal is based on how the data and/or actions are being referenced/used. Is the frequency for editing the data high or low? If it's low, then maybe the user doesn't need field access. What is the frequency of record deletion? Low? Then, do you really need that obvious red trash can icon on ev

FileMaker Magazine

June 30, 2021

Towards A Better JavaScript Development Environment

Writing JavaScript in FileMaker is hard. Sure, the path is easy to see and clear to follow, but the actual writing of the code is hard. I have tried to find a way to write JS code that makes it fairly easy. And by “easy,” I mean “make it so that FileMaker developers don’t have […] The post Towards A Better JavaScript Development Environment appeared first on Geist Interactive. View the full article

Todd Geist

June 29, 2021

FileMaker 19 + JSONata

Introduction Recently I had the pleasure of speaking with Jeremy Brown on The Context Podcast about an open-source project called JSONata that enables you to query and transform JSON. The JSONata site is packed with useful information, including this short video… …as well as… Extensive documentation A link to the Stack Overflow forum, where you… Continue reading FileMaker 19 + JSONataView the full article

Kevin Frank

June 29, 2021

Sortie de FileMaker 19.3

Claris l’avait annoncé : finies les traditionnelles grandes sorties du moi de mai. Le cycle « Agile » consiste en des mises à jour plus fréquentes, avec une répartition des nouveautés tout au long de l’année. Cette semaine, c’est la version 19.3 qui a été annoncée, et c’est une version importante même si surtout « technique ». Petit résumé […] Cet article Sortie de FileMaker 19.3 est apparu en premier sur 1-more-thing. View the full article

fabriceN

June 27, 2021

Sortie de FileMaker 19.3

Claris l’avait annoncé : finies les traditionnelles grandes sorties du mois de mai. Le cycle « Agile » consiste en des mises à jour plus fréquentes, avec une répartition des nouveautés tout au long de l’année. Cette semaine, c’est la version 19.3 qui a été annoncée, et c’est une version importante même si surtout « technique ». Petit résumé […] Cet article Sortie de FileMaker 19.3 est apparu en premier sur 1-more-thing. View the full article

fabriceN

June 27, 2021

FileMaker 19

Claris FileMaker 19.3 Overview

Claris' 19.3 release of the FileMaker platform is out! In this article, we will discuss our favorite new features including native support for Apple Silicone, leveraging Microsoft Edge, and FileMaker Cloud-native script schedules! Read the full article here.

dbservices in FileMaker 19

June 23, 2021

Mutually Exclusive Values

Value lists are one of the fundamental building blocks of any good UI built on top of a database system. Providing users with a preselected list of options to choose from helps the data entry process go faster and - is - just easier. When using value lists, there are times when you need to limit the number of selections of any given value to being used just once. You may also need to enforce that one of each of all possible values is used. In this video, we tackle both situations by enforcing

FileMaker Magazine

June 21, 2021

fmcloud.fm available in Switzerland

The post fmcloud.fm available in Switzerland appeared first on fmcloud.fm. View the full article

fabriceN

June 16, 2021

fmcloud.fm available in Switzerland

fmcloud.fm, the only FileMaker hosting service running on Linux/Docker, is now available in Switzerland too, as well as USA, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Singapore and Australia. The post fmcloud.fm available in Switzerland appeared first on fmcloud.fm. View the full article

fabriceN

June 16, 2021

Big 3 Local Development Options

Being able to develop locally, as if the data and the server was right there on your local machine provides a nice advantage. You know how the solution will work when hosted, you can develop and test PSOS scripts effectively, and you're generally protected from client crashes. Plus, you're fully mobile if need be - it's all on one machine. This is where hosting your FileMaker solutions locally becomes a big advantage. This video showcases what I consider to be the Big 3 of local hosting. 1) You

FileMaker Magazine

June 11, 2021

Extracting System Paths - Media Archiving

In the process of creating a simple media archiving database I found I had used the same skill twice because of how FileMaker returns data from certain functions. Hence, I decided to provide you with my simple little start to a Media Archiving solution. Simply, it asks for a folder, then pulls the paths to all files from the selected, and enclosed, folders into the database. It's really a pretty simple thing because it's managed with one simple function from the BaseElements plug-in. However,

FileMaker Magazine

June 4, 2021

FileMaker Integrations

FileMaker Formstack Integration

Formstack takes your FileMaker data collection to the next level! Formstack can automate document creation, collect secure signatures, and drive your data collection with astonishingly customizable forms. Our integration guide includes a video and sample files to get you started! Read the full article and download the sample file here.

dbservices in FileMaker Integrations

June 1, 2021