Canonical Coding

by Matt Petrowsky

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Doing your best to create a robust FileMaker solution is likely part of your goals and objectives. However, until you know how to approach some aspects of your solution design, you can easily spend a lot of time creating something which can be both hard to maintain and upgrade.

This is where canonical coding comes into action. The objective with canonical coding is to put a number of things specific to your whole solution in singular locations. This is also covered by the premise of DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) coding.

In this video, I showcase my new technique file which I'll be using for my FileMaker 12 examples. Much of what is covered can also be accomplished in older versions of FileMaker as well. The video shows you how to implement a localization model which takes advantage of "Settings" layouts.

If you've not used "Settings" layouts then you're likely putting a lot of text into a lot of places where changing that text at a later date will cost you a lot of time and effort. Watch this video if you're interested in making the most robust possible solution you can with FileMaker Pro!