Eric Kelly

Position filled.

Job Title: FileMaker Developer Organization: WestCoast Children’s Clinic, a nonprofit children’s mental health clinic primarily serving foster children. Location: Oakland, CA 94601. This is an in-house position – no long-distance or offshore applications will be considered. Compensation: $60/hour, contract, minimum 32 hours/week. Position is currently funded for full time for six months, with the possibility of extending longer, potentially as a salaried position. Job Description: The FileMaker Developer will work closely with the Lead Filemaker Developer and IT Director to assist with ongoing development, maintenance, and troubleshooting of a complex FileMaker Pro 11 database used by the agency for clinical documentation, client tracking, billing, and management reporting. Work will be focused on implementing new features, and debugging and improving existing features as needed. Duties will include UI and layout design, scripting, and creating/modifying fields, calculations, tables and relationships as needed. Qualifications: • 2+ years experience programming in Filemaker Pro v7 and above, including complex relational design, scripting, report and UI design. If you do not have Filemaker experience, do not apply for this position. • Familiarity with working on complex server-based solutions in FileMaker Pro v7 and later in a mixed platform environment. • Commitment to the clinic’s mission and population. • Ability to work both collaboratively and independently. • Must be able to provide samples of past Filemaker work to demonstrate abilities. • Nonprofit experience a plus. If interested, please submit a cover letter and a resume describing how you meet these qualifications to careers@westcoastcc.org with the job title in the subject line. Resumes without cover letters will be disregarded. No phone calls or recruiters please.

FileMaker Pro Developer POSITION SUMMARY The FileMaker Pro Developer will work closely with the IT Director to assist with ongoing development, maintenance, and troubleshooting of a complex FileMaker Pro 10 database used by the agency for clinical documentation, client tracking, billing, and management reporting. ABOUT WCC WestCoast Children’s Clinic is an established nonprofit community-based mental health clinic, specialized in providing services to vulnerable children, youth and their families in Alameda, San Francisco and Contra Costa Counties, regardless of their ability to pay. We are particularly committed to helping children in the social services and foster care systems, and work with a culturally diverse population. ESSENTIAL JOB DUTIES • Develop new features according to specifications provided by IT Director and other agency staff • Test and debug newly implemented features • Streamline and improve existing database functions • Test existing reports for data integrity and validity • Respond to end user bug reports, diagnose and fix bugs • Participate in meetings with IT and agency staff to plan new database features and improve existing features COMPENSATION Full Time, $80-$90K DOE, plus benefits. Benefits include full medical, dental, vision, life, EAP, Flex and 403b plan. QUALIFICATIONS • 2+ years experience programming in Filemaker Pro v7 and above required, including complex relational design, scripting (including script triggers), report and UI design, custom functions, data viewer and script debugger. If you do not have advanced Filemaker experience, do not apply for this position. • Familiarity with maintaining complex server-based solutions in FileMaker Pro v7 and later in a mixed platform environment. • Experience administering Filemaker Pro Server v9 or above. • Prior experience developing Filemaker solutions with multiple levels of security and account-based access restrictions. • Ability to analyze and understand complicated legacy code. • Commitment to the clinic’s mission and population. • Ability to work both collaboratively and independently. • Must be able to provide samples of past Filemaker work to demonstrate abilities. DESIRED • Prior nonprofit experience. • Filemaker certification. • PHP, XML, SQL, ODBC. OTHER REQUIREMENTS This is an in-house position – no long-distance, telecommuting or offshore applications will be considered. HOW TO APPLY Email your cover letter describing how you meet these qualifications & resume to careers@westcoastcc.org with the job title in the subject line. Resumes without cover letters will be disregarded. Fax to (510) 269-9031 or Mail: Human Resources, WestCoast Children’s Clinic, 3301 East 12th Street, Ste. 259, Oakland, CA 94601 www.westcoastcc.org An Equal Opportunity Employer. People of color, women & others of traditionally underrepresented groups are strongly encouraged to apply.

Actually we're using version 5.5 of server and 6 of Filemaker, and yes, the FM Server is on a separate computer from the terminal server machine.

We are still ironing out the bugs in our new terminal server, and I'm trying to figure out why we get frequent disconnects (as often as once every two minutes). This is not a common bug with FM 6 and terminal services, is it? Thanks, Eric

OK, scratch that previous post. In fact, sometimes the routine never works, so the loop above just goes on endlessly. A much better solution is: Enter find Mode [] Set Field ["User ID#", "gID Current User"] Perform Find [Replace Found Set] In other words, use Set Field instead of copy/paste -- which normally I always do, except I had been laboring under the misconception that setting a field using a global didn't work when in find mode. The problem was that I was trying to set a field from a global that was a different *type* of field. Unfortunately, I still have several scripts where I have to do this, involving date fields. I guess I'll use a loop script like in my previous example, but include a counter that exits after 20 passes and tell the user to try again.

Good to know the problem is not just unique to our setup. I *think* I may have found a workaround. Because the problem is intermittant, creating a loop seems to work: Loop Enter Browse Mode [] Copy [select, "gID Current User"] Enter Find Mode [] Paste [select, No style, "User ID#"] Exit Loop If ["IsEmpty(User ID#)=0"] End Loop Perform Find [Replace Found Set] Running this little test script, I can sometimes see the screen blinking repeatedly as it cycles several times, but so far it has always eventually been successful at copying and pasting. The other thing I haven't tried yet, and need to wait till the weekend, is to update FM Server 5.5 from v2 to v4, though from the fix list it doesn't look like this will change anything relevant to our operation. One other issue which I'm not sure if it is with our terminal server setup or if it is a FM bug is that we keep dropping the connection, sometimes as often as every minute or two, and other times not at all during a 2+ hour session.

We have FM Server 5.5 running on a G4, accessed by FM 6 clients on OS X 10.3 and XP. We just installed a terminal server running Windows Server 2003. In testing out our rather complex database solution over terminal services, I encountered one print script that is supposed to only select records for the current user and print them. Instead, it prints every user's records. I narrowed down the failure to the following script steps: Copy [select, "gID Current User"] <-- this is a global field Enter Find Mode [] Paste [select, No style, "User ID"] <-- this is a number field What fails (apparently randomly) is that the copy step fails to copy the global field, even though the global field is right there on the layout. This happens about once every 2-10 times the script is executed, and it only happens when using terminal services. Once it has happened, running the above mini-script fails unless I go into browse mode and start over. I have tried inserting pauses into the script, telling it to go into browse mode before copying, turning error capture on and off, and nothing has worked. Two questions: Is there any known fix for this? If not, can anybody think of a workaround? I need to set the number field to the value of the global field while in find mode somehow. Thanks,

Glory halleluiah! Thanks so much. I knew it could be done, I just couldn't wrap my brain around it. In your debt, Eric

I previously posted a question about this, but for some reason the thread seems to have disappeared. Here goes again, and I'm attaching a couple of generic sample files. If anyone can solve this one for me, I will reward them with...well, glory and praise. It seems to me like it should be incredibly simple, but I just can't solve it. In my two stripped down sample files, Clients.fp5 and Services.fp5, I've got 10 clients entered in Clients, with unique IDs. Services references these clients by ID, but some clients have different funding over time; in other words, client #1 may have three services paid for by Medi-Cal but then switches to Self Pay. The report (set up in Services with a script) needs to summarize how many services were provided for each pay source, and then how many discrete clients fell under each pay source. In my example, the correct numbers of discrete clients for each pay source should be: Insurance 6, Medi-Cal 4, Self Pay 5. Riley Waugh responded to my original post with a general suggestion to get the data via finds or relational portals from the Clients file. I keep thinking there must be a simpler way. Anyone up for this challenge? Example.zip

Thanks, Riley. You are basically suggesting that I automate what I ended up having to do manually. While this would work, it bothers me that it seems like it wouldn't be very flexible. The way I'm envisioning it, I would have to predefine the funding source categories from the Service file in my find operation in the Clients file, so that whenever we added a new funding source, I'd have to reprogram the find scripts. I'm sure there's a more elegant solution, I'm just not coming up with it yet. Eric

I am hugely grateful to all who have posted, particularly Bob Kundinger. This is a terrific forum. Your info has greatly increased my understanding of the issues involved in our project. As it turns out, security is VERY important, while "branding" or prettiness isn't -- the main function of this system would be to allow psychotherapists to enter their confidential client notes from remote locations, rather than having to come back to the clinic to do it, and also to allow supervisors to review notes, and administrators to review productivity stats. If I understand the advice above correctly, we should go with some sort of third party application to interface with the FM database, rather than use either of FM's built-in tools, because of security concerns. We are a non-profit, so cost is a big issue; also, the database tends to be a bit sluggish as it is, so speediness would be a consideration in whatever tool we used. Given this extra info, would people care to recommend any particular third party tool (Lasso, PHP, etc.)? Thanks, Eric

Thanks so much for your helpful reply. I didn't realize that you could run FM Server and FM Unlimited on the same set of files simultaneously. There are potentially quite a few remote users who would wish to access files, so I don't think that purchasing extra FMPro licenses for everyone will be very practical. I am curious about one comment you made -- I thought FM Unlimited essentially could serve files directly to the web with layouts and formatting intact, but your comment sounds like there would be a lot of extra work involved in tailoring the solution to the web. I have never tapped the web features of FMPro, so have no idea what is involved. Thanks, Eric

This may be a hopelessly ignorant question, but I'll ask anyway. We have a number of files running on our OS X network, hosted by FM Server 5.5. It now looks like we will need to provide remote access to these files via the Web, but still have them served inhouse by FM Server. I see how one can serve files on the web using FM Unlimited, but what about Server? Do we need to purchase some special additional CGI? Thanks, Eric