The Support Group Blog

Fun fact: the term debug was coined by Admiral Grace Hopper while working on the Mark II computer in the 1940's. A moth became stuck inside the computer and Grace commented that they were debugging the computer as they literally worked to remove the bug. The moth was eventually freed and then the term stuck. You can now find that moth at the Smithsonian Museum. 

Back when I was introduced to JavaScript, I used alert dialogs to debug my javascript code. If you're chuckling reading this then you're probably a pro! If not, you should watch my demo where I show you a few different ways to invoke a JavaScript debugger to help you find a bug or resolve a semantic issue in your code.

Let’s Play Cards!

The Card Window was introduced in FileMaker 16. We learned some pretty cool development techniques and use cases for Card Windows during a FileMaker Developer Conference 2018 session.

TRANSACTIONS

Card Windows can be a great tool for transactional programming. You can easily arrange for transactional events to either pass or fail, meaning all edits/adds/deletes that happen during the transaction are either committed or not. Cards can be leveraged to guide the user through a process, storing the data via global fields, variables or JSON arrays along the way. Ultimately, the data will only be committed if the user completes all of the steps. Incidentally, you can also use slide panels to create this user experience.