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The Support Group

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The Royal Treatment

The Support Group Helps a National Entertainment Company Manage Royalty Reporting

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.

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Select Script Options by First Performing Them Manually

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.

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Using Custom Extended Privileges

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.

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Searching Across Relationships for “Empty” Fields

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.

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Making an Old FileMaker System Young Again

The Support Group Helps Mass Insight Help Schools

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.

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Using the Web Viewer as a “Field” in FileMaker Go

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?

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Displaying iPad Video on Your Desktop

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.

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Webinar: Maximizing Mobility with FileMaker Go

Today I presented the webinar “Maximizing Mobility with FileMaker Go”, hosted by FileMaker, Inc.‘s Rick Colcock.  Thank you to all who attended; if you missed it or want to check it out again, you can download the video.

iPhones and iPads have changed the way people work with information. When developing solutions using FileMaker Go, you’ll want to design your workflows and user experience to fit the way people create and consume mobile data. This session will cover useful tips and techniques to optimize FileMaker for mobile use. We will explore FileMaker development with an eye to adapting workflow patterns and user interaction to the mobile paradigm, as well as the new opportunities mobile devices present, such as geolocation.

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Checking Screen Orientation in FileMaker Go

A reader asks:

When developing for FileMaker Go, is it possible to write a script that does one thing if the iPhone or iPad is held vertically and another if it’s held horizontally?  How it could be done?

“Yes we can!” (my son has been watching a lot of Bob the Builder). We need the Get ( WindowContentHeight ) and Get ( WindowContentWidth ) functions.

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Prepaid, Discounted FileMaker Consulting

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.

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