Who has lost their marbles here??

[Søren Dyhr]

Being well aware of Filemaker Inc. in their starter templates leads the newbe right into the limbo by using repeating fields, could a lot been said about focus vs. principles. Then did I encounter this apparent award, that made me drop my jaw!

http://www.elmersystems.dk/News/default.htm#WorldsGreatest

...using a .jpg that(from the main page), appears to be almost official - perhaps it is genuine??? This company has some connection to the official filemaker site:

http://www.filemaker.dk/developers/elmersys.htm

But how can it be you become awarded for exceeding 20000 field definitions in one single solution??? In my ears is such a gestalt or featurette a sign of a highly unnormalized structure to say the least.

Relational designs doesn't seem to be embraced fully, and I find it silly to endorse a company or allow a company to selfendorse via degree-mill'ish behaviours, for not fully grasping something in the vicinity of http://previews.filemakermagazine.com/videos/513/DataTagging_full.mov or

They are simply a way to turn one table into two or more tables. Let’s look at a simple example: Again we’ll use a hypothetical contacts database. Let’s say that for each contact, you need to store a few phone numbers, some mailing addresses and a couple of email addresses. The traditional approach is to create three related tables; one for phones, one for mailing addresses and one for email addresses. But you know you will never have a great many contacts, and it seems a waste to have three tables for so little related information. You create one multi-purpose table and build three relationships (TO’s) to it from your contacts table. All of the fields you would have put into three separate related tables are put into one multi-purpose table. The multi-purpose table has three foreign key fields and three relationships from the contacts table, one each for phones, etc. These relationships and their portals in the contacts table will behave exactly like relationships to separate tables.

...excerpted from page 16 of http://www.codemastersworkshop.com/Downloads/WhitePaperForFMPNovices.pdf

I know free markeds and bla-bla-bla, but I can't help putting this in the perspective when weighting certification and FSA memberships against getting the gist in relational designs as such.

...Or am I once again overseeing this fact???

LEST FOOLS SHOULD FAIL

True wisdom knows

it must comprise

some nonsense

as a compromise,

lest fools shouls fail

to find it wise.

...from http://chat.carleton.ca/~tcstewar/grooks/grooks.html

--sd

[Ender]

It looks like it's a self proclaimed accolade:

"Elmer Systems Business Suite seems to be the world's greatest known FileMaker-solution on the market today." says CEO Hans Elmer...

I don't know what the rest of your bla-bla-bla was about. :qwery:

[Vaughan]

Hmmm.

I went through the FMP Creative Suite solutions last night for ideas. These are FMP 7 files. I gave up after looking at two of them. Complete and utter crap, the developers responsible should be ashamed.

One of them had an about layout that appeared briefly at file opening, then disappeared. I could find no way to return to it other than entering layout mode. Once in this about page there was no way to return to the main interface other than through lauout mode again!

At leastone layout had loose fields on the bottom of the layout, the kind that are added by FMP automatically when new fields are defined.

The interface gave no clue as to what the capabilities of the software were.

They looked superficially pretty in that "lets make everything look like a web page because web pages are cool" kinda way, just like magazine design did in the mid 1990s when Courier font and square brackets became trendy again, at least until Netscape 3 came out with the tag.

I have serious doubts as to the quality of the developers FMI uses for these templates.

[flapjacks]

That's why we write the data bases and they write the program. I have yet to see an out of the box DB solution that does not severly test business rules. Take heart, that's precisely why we are gainfully employed.

John