Creating Universal Pickers

[FileMaker Magazine]

In the world of FileMaker solutions, it's almost inevitable that a solution will experience significant growth during the initial stages, followed by a transition to the everyday pace of normal use. When developing those initial features, one of your key objectives should be to emphasize reuse and repurposing. As is often the case, the less you have to manage, the easier it becomes to maintain and update your solution. There's less to re-learn, and your scripts, layouts, calculations, and other elements are more straightforward to locate and update.

However, if you tend to create numerous one-off duplicates within your code, you may end up with a collection of disparate elements that require attention or become obscured over time as additional features are added, potentially duplicating some earlier functionality. In complex solutions, it's not uncommon to become confused about what was implemented earlier and inadvertently replicate entire feature sets.

In such scenarios, you're left with the burden of either consolidation or selecting one implementation to retain while removing the others. A more effective approach is to proceed by making aspects of your solution universal and the default method for accessing specific functionality. This is where creating universal pickers that apply solution-wide can yield substantial benefits. In this video, we address precisely this situation and guide you on how to approach their implementation.

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