The Support Group Blog

Low-code development platforms allow users to automate or streamline workflows. For example, an intuitive drag-and-drop interface makes it easy to turn a manual process or static spreadsheet into a dynamic application. That is the power of low-code development platforms.

One of the most attractive features of a low-code platform is that users don't have to be trained software developers. Instead, any necessary coding is usually done behind the scenes so that the user can focus on function rather than syntax. Yet, the platform can be flexible enough to accommodate code if the user prefers.

Since very early in its life FileMaker (perhaps even before it was FileMaker Pro) could store binary data (zeros and ones). We have all kept things like pictures, movies, and eventually portable document formats (PDFs), Word documents, and even object linking and embedding (OLE) files on Windows. If you can store it in a file, you can put it in a container field. As FileMaker evolved over the years and embraced new technology trends, such as QuickTime and Adobe's PDF format, the container field capabilities have expanded to integrate the latest file trends with our data-driven workflows. Let's explore some of the fundamental parts of setting up and using container fields.

Container fields act very much like the other types of data storing fields, including text, number, date, time, timestamp, etc., except we can't search, sort, or use them as a key in a relationship. However, we can set them up to be stored globally, targeted in scripts, and utilized in calculations and the results of calculations. The one thing that container fields feature that other "data" fields don't is the option to store themselves externally.