Filemaker 9: New Features

[JesseSFR]

It must be the shot glass full of vodka, that probably takes away from your credibilty ;-) I suggest naming yourself something much more credible like Six Fried Rice. It's got a nice ring to it and people can relate. I actually like the idea behind your post and will probably put some thought into it. We have done smaller projects for Google Earth where you organize a couple hundred data points and provide additional information about them based upon FileMaker data. It turned out to be pretty fun and quite sweet to look at when it's finished.

[JesseSFR]

This is a great idea.... the image storage is a pain. When writing it up for the new book it was a little bothersome to test it. That could definitely interest some people.

The Mac vs. PC thing would be great too.... I could spend a lot of time on that one.... things like screen flickering, and different font rendering sizes. Good call audio freak

[Genx]

“Hey Harry that’s the first girl I ever seen you with that you didn’t have to blow up”!

LOL! You know it took my brain about 10 minutes to process that. At first I was like... "Why would Harry have to explode girls?".

building filemaker widgets with FM Server

That must be a Mac only thing yeh?

[JesseSFR]

Good point... how about widgets and gadget then.

[Genx]

Lol,

It's hard not to laugh at Microsoft's "originality" - but sounds good :

[JesseSFR]

Genx, you are going to start a fight. That's the last thing we need... a bunch of FileMaker dorks, like ourselves, arguing about Vista vs OS X and mac's vs. PC.

I just opened the smiley face thing for the first time... it's ridiculous in there. There seems to be almost 100 choices. I'm never going back in there it's scary.

[Genx]

Nah, I don't think I am, everyone knows I love windows anyway (personal preference) but that doesn't stop me having a go at them sometimes.. besides, it's been fought to death on these forums.

And you're right, that smiley panel is kind of scary lol.

[JesseSFR]

Alright, we put up an article about how to hook up the EES feature for FileMaker 9. We will probably put up another one in the coming weeks for advanced users as well:

enjoy the article

[mr_vodka]

Speaking of icons: Just when I was starting to remember what the darn icons in the Script Debugger window were without having to wait for the tooltip, they go and change the icons on me. Oh bother. Just give me text buttons...

Note a couple nice additions to the the Script Debugger: Last Error (if you click it, it brings up the error code in the Help Viewer), and the Pause on error checkbox.

Speaking of the debugger, I finally got Advanced 9 installed and found out unlike the old debugger where closing out the debugger window would halt the rest of the running script's execution, in FM9 it will continue on with the rest of the script. so you must HALT it first. Keep this in mind if there happens to be a DELETE in your script steps; maybe further down.

So lets say that you put in a break point to do some debugging. Then you make some changes because you found the issue. Upon correcting it, you want to save it and then exit the debugging window. The problem is that it will execute the rest of the script upon closing it unless you stop running of it; whereas in previous versions, as soon as you went to close the window, it halted the rest of the script as well.

Edited August 1, 2007 by Guest

[JesseSFR]

Yea this is a pretty neat feature.... but can sometimes cause some confusion. You'll notice when you go to save a change in script that it is currently running it will tell you that you must halt.

The nice part about about this functionality is that you can actually view the detail of a script and make changes without having to cancel execution. Which can be nice.

[JesseSFR]

I know we were talking about how to retain the ability to number your pages in a pdf somewhere... don't know where, but we went ahead and wrote up another post on it.... here it is:

Numbering Pages while using Append to PDF

[JesseSFR]

I just realized I forgot to put this up for the consumption of my fellow forum members. We took some time to map out the ports for FileMaker server 9 so that you could figure out which ports to open when talking through firewalls. If anyone can think of any we left out please speak up!

FileMaker Server 9 Firewall

Edited August 1, 2007 by Guest

[mr_vodka]

Nice breakdown and great diagram.

[Michael Reade]

Was there a new feature about triggering scripts on field entry or exit? I thought I read something about it somewhere (can't remember where).

Would be nice to have it work nativelly rather than then external plugin (MacExample/ WinExample).

Michael

[mr_vodka]

Was there a new feature about triggering scripts on field entry or exit? I thought I read something about it somewhere (can't remember where).

This were just hopeful rumors; nothing more.

http://thinksecret.com/news/0701filemaker9.html

http://thinksecret.com/news/0702filemaker9.html

[Michael Reade]

What a pity...

Michael

[JesseSFR]

I'm still out of town vacationing so I haven't been able to do much work or blogging (sigh of regret). But I just put up an article on File Recovery which will probably be helpful to some of you:

http://sixfriedrice.com/wp/dealing-with-damaged-filemaker-files/

By the way, it was pretty cool actually seeing some of you guys at DevCon and since it's in our neck of the woods next year we will definitely be hosting something.... What... I don't know just yet.

Back to vacation...

[Vaughan]

"Was there a new feature about triggering scripts on field entry or exit?"

No, but an enormous amount can be done with auto-enter calculations that negates the need for scripts.

In addition to this some freeware script triggering plugins are around, so it's not like event triggering cannot be done right now.

[David Jondreau]

I put off using a script trigger plug-in for years. Don't know why, just stubborn I guess. But I finally gave in after I saw the pre release of 9 didn't have it native and think zippScript 2.2 is the bombizzle. Fo' rizzle.

If FM came out with native script triggering, I'd still use zippScript in all my solutions. It's free (but donate!) and incredibly useful.

I no longer see script triggering as a priority for FMI and it's low on my wish list. (Set Field by calculation is number one.)

And no, I am in no way associated with the zippTools folks, just a satisfied user.