What’s a well-known, national entertainment organization to do when they need a way to track the music for their many television programs? Turn to FileMaker Pro, of course.
Sometimes, when writing a FileMaker script to do a find, sort, or export, doing it manually first can save you LOTS of time.
I was just tasked with creating a script to export all the fields on a layout. The layout, however, is non-trivial and contains fields from multiple different tables, and the relationship graph I inherited is very complicated and nearly impossible to decipher. It would have taken me HOURS to identify the table occurrence and field name of every field on this layout and then set up the export in a script.
Over the years I have noticed that some beginner and intermediate level developers are not aware of the possible uses of extended privileges, other than as a means of controlling methods of sharing (such as through standard FileMaker Pro to Server networking, Instant Web Publishing, PHP, etc…). Extended privileges are probably one of the most underused features in FileMaker and at the same time incredibly simple and powerful with regards to enforcing security and access control. I have seen people write very complex scripts that attempt to manage or limit access to specific areas of a system, creating elaborate, complex security access levels or hard coding some of this security functionality within the data structure when they could have used custom extended privileges to do the same in a cleaner and most efficient manner.
Have you ever wanted to find records where a certain field is empty? Suppose you are updating your contact database and trying to capture email addresses for as many people as possible. You need to find every person for whom you do not have an email address. When searching in FileMaker, the equal sign operator (=) is used to find an exact match; when used by itself in a field, with nothing else following it, it tells FileMaker to find records where the field is empty. So… easy enough, right? Just go to the contact detail view, enter Find mode, type an equals sign into the email field (or select the symbol from the Operators popup in the toolbar), and click the Perform Find button.
Mass Insight is a Boston-based group that works to benefit education and provide competitive advantages to schools on multiple levels. The organization is comprised of two segments: Mass Insight Global Partnerships, a consulting firm that unites schools, companies and government agencies for the purpose of building competitive advantage, and Mass Insight Education, a non-profit affiliate that works to improve public school performance in the math and sciences as well as help to revive the schools themselves.
One of our customers recently needed a field to be both non-editable and scrollable in FileMaker Go. Here’s his request:
I need to build a system for someone to read a form on an iPad and capture their signature in a container field. The forms are of variable length and will change over time. So I want to put the body of the text into a field for each form for each signature. Since the form can be very long, the user will need to scroll to read the whole thing. But, when you click into a field, the keyboard pops up on the iPad. Is there away to suppress that?
Last week I presented a webinar titled Maximizing Mobility with FileMaker Go. As we prepared for the session, we encountered a challenge: how to best present the portion of the material that takes place on an iPad and broadcast it via WebEx.
A number of clients have recently signed up for or renewed their Sapphire Maintenance Plan, and in talking about it, we realized that it’s not as well known as some of our other offerings. It’s an annual service and support agreement that provides you with ongoing access to a team of expert FileMaker Certified developers at a reduced rate.
A few months ago, I delivered a webinar on advanced scripting and calculations. Along with the video demonstrations, I made available the FileMaker file for download. Dennis watched the webinar, downloaded the file, and asked a most reasonable question:
Thanks for your example of a Quick Find. I am having trouble understanding the find definitions in the Quick Search script [shown below]. I understand that the 401 error traps the situation where none of the search argument finds a hit in the table, but I dont understand what the omit statements are supposed to do. Could you please elaborate? Thanks!
A reader wrote in with a problem:
We just started using FileMaker 11 with databases that were created in previous versions. In Browse, mode the text formatting button in the layout bar is grayed out. Is there a way to make this active?
The key clue here to solving the issue was the fact that these files were created in previous versions. The culprit? Custom menus.
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