Data Viewer extensions in MBS Plugin

[MonkeybreadSoftware]

Let us show you nine features of MBS FileMaker Plugin around the data viewer in FileMaker. While all are available on macOS, only one is also available on Windows:

Toggle data viewer

To show or hide the data viewer, just run MBS("Menubar.RunMenuCommand"; 49297) to trigger the menu command. Of course you need a menu set where this command is included and sufficient permissions.

You can define a hotkey via MBS FileMaker Plugin to show an hide the data viewer via a keyboard shortcut on macOS and Windows:

Set Variable [$hotkey; Value:MBS("HotKey.Register"; "F5"; "control")]
Set Variable [$r; Value:MBS( "HotKey.SetEvaluate"; $hotkey; "MBS(\"Menubar.RunMenuCommand\"; 49297)" )]

You may also use our Toolbar functions or even the TouchBar functions to define a custom button to toggle the data viewer.

Find text

For macOS we have a search feature for various lists in FileMaker. We add it to the OS control used by FileMaker (NSTableView and NSOutlineView classes), so it appears in all places within the application independent of whether FileMaker may have its own search feature.

Click on the title bar of the data viewer window to bring the focus to it. A colored line frames the list of variables. Now press ⌘F to show the search bar.

Type something and press return key to jump to the next one. Repeat the return key or ⌘G to move to the next one.

You can click Done button to close the search panel if needed. it will show again if you press ⌘F. Since we reuse the find bar if possible, your old search string may still be there.

Zoom

When you have focus on the list (colored line around), you can press command key with plus to zoom in:

⌘ +	zoom in
⌘ -	zoom out
⌘ =	zoom 100%

The plugin zooms the control without FileMaker knowning about, so the title bar doesn't zoom with it, but we expect you know what the column headers are anyway.

Hide fields

While the list has focus, you can press ⌘ ⌥ F combination to toggle whether fields show up.

The plugin hides all lines containing :: in the list. Or do we? If you watch closely, you may notice our trick. We don't hide them, but change the height to 1 in order to not mess up the list for FileMaker.

Hide global variables

Similar to hiding fields the list has focus, you can press ⌘ ⌥ G combination to toggle whether global variables show up.

Again we change line height to 1 to hide them from view.

Tooltips to show values

For the debugger we once created a feature to show the value of a variable or field in a tooltip. So while hoving over a variable name or Table::Field notation, the plugin can evaluate that and show you the value.

The data viewer already shows you the value, so the feature is not so useful in the data viewer. So please use it in the debugger, so you don't need to look into the data viewer to see the value of a value.

DataViewer Content

The FM.DataViewerContent function allows you to query the content of the data viewer as text. This was created to either use it for automatically logging in debugging sessions to what you see in the data viewer. The calculation triggering the MBS function may be triggered via hotkey (see HotKey.Register), in a monitored expression or maybe even in a script. For the script, a short pause may help to refresh the window.

Of course we can only capture visible text, so you can disable this function with not having sufficient permissions to see variables or by hiding the window.

Debugger.IsDataViewerVisible

If you like to know whether the data viewer is visible, just call Debugger.IsDataViewerVisible function. this may be used to detect in a script or function, whether it is being debugged an doing extra work, like setting debug only variables. (see also Debugger.IsVisible).

Copy Content

When the list has focus, you can press ⌘ ⌥ C to copy the content. This wil copy the content of the data viewer and paste it e.g. in some text document.

 

While all those improvements should be built-in to FileMaker and available for both macOS and Windows, we know Claris has a bit different strategy. So for the time being, we add those if you install the MBS FileMaker Plugin on macOS in either FileMaker Pro or Claris Pro.

Please do not hesitate to contact us with questions.