The Support Group Blog

There are a variety of web services out there to help teams do their work efficiently and effectively. FileMaker and Airtable are just a few go-to solutions for business folks struggling with organizing their time, projects, and people.

Airtable is generally perceived as easy to use. It's an excellent tool to turn to when you're not quite sure what you need, but you know a simple spreadsheet isn't up to the challenge. However, you might want to consider building an application with the FileMaker platform if your requirements include complex data patterns, multi-step workflows, and/or detailed, layered user interfaces. 

Thanks to modern technologies, different users, teams, divisions, etc., in an organization don't necessarily have to use the same tools. And, there are ways to integrate systems so that they share information reliably and securely.

In this article, we'll review how we can establish connections between FileMaker and Airtable.

Claris introduced a new feature in version 18 of the FileMaker Platform called Save a Copy as XML. You can find this command within the Tools menu if you have the "use advanced tools" option enabled in the FileMaker desktop application's Preferences section. With this menu command, Claris gives us a window into each of our custom apps' inner workings, as well as a way to more easily document even the most complex ones.

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a web development tool used to store and transport data. Like HTML, which is a markup language for data presentation, XML requires opening and closing tags. XML is useful for FileMaker development because it facilitates the exchange of data between two systems. However, we can also use it to parse or read our data. In this article, we'll explore how we can protect the integrity of our FileMaker applications as we scale and evolve them.

Common Types of Relationships 

Previously, we discussed one-to-many relational databases. By far, this is the most common type of data relationship that we encounter. We discussed parents and children. A parent record can have many child records, but a child record belongs to one and only one parent record. Those relationships are defined through data. A parent record has a primary key that is assigned when a record is created. A child record displays part of the DNA of its parent by carrying the unique parent ID in a foreign key field. When the child’s foreign key value matches the parent’s primary key value we have a link between those records.

Other types of relationships occur as well. In this article, we’ll cover one-to-one and many-to-many database relationships.

What is a Database?

A database is an organized method of storing information in a computer system. There are many different database products on the market, but they all boil down to keeping track of your important personal or organizational information.

Previously, we talked about how to access FileMaker on Linux. In this article, we'll review how to integrate FileMaker Linux Server with cloud-based storage options like AWS, Backblaze, Dropbox, or even a LAN-based drive so that we can easily access it from our app of choice. 

You may have heard that Claris has introduced a version of FileMaker Server for Linux. With the introduction of Claris's new Linux version of FileMaker Server and it's command-line based environment, many folks are wondering how to access their backups and other related files. Well, it is not as hard as many may think. But first, we need to review some basics about cloud services before we get started.

Imagine coding an app from scratch. How long do you think it would take you to develop and perfect it? How much effort do you think it would take to maintain and debug it? 

Low-code development platforms negate these types of questions. You can use some code or no code to develop an app to improve your workflows. What's more, you can apply your technical and non-technical skills to design the app. Keep reading to learn about low-code and what makes for an excellent low-code development platform.

In a previous article, we chatted about FileMaker error codes and made a point to emphasize the importance of keeping our eyes open during development. We have to be ever vigilant within the obscure areas of our solutions where things might break. Sometimes, we have to push our solutions to the brink in the hopes of revealing a weakness that may have otherwise gone unnoticed. We also took a look at a few techniques for trapping errors and then organizing them so that we can deal with them appropriately. This post will explore a new tool that Claris gave us a few versions back called Set Error Logging. This tool allows us to take error trapping to a whole new height.

The Claris FileMaker Platform makes it easy for us to develop functional custom applications. We can move data from repeating fields and manage and customize images in FileMaker applications. It's also relatively easy for us to identify errors, but we have to know how to organize and interpret FileMaker error codes. If we learn when and how to leverage specific tools that FileMaker provides to troubleshoot bugs within our apps, we can avoid issues and frustrations down the line.

Identifying and capturing errors within our FileMaker applications are an essential part of the development process and it can feel a bit like a roller coaster ride. When we create an app that makes our jobs easier, we want to make sure that it does the right things effectively and reliably. That's why having a solid understanding of the potential error codes we might encounter and how to resolve them successfully is so important. In this post, we'll deal with the highs and lows of fool-proofing our FileMaker apps by maneuvering through conventional errors and exploring some common places where bugs tend to crop up.

If you've been around the FileMaker world as long as we have, you remember back when FileMaker Server 5.5 was released. One of the most remarkable aspects of that release was that it not only ran on Windows and macOS but also on Linux. FileMaker Server 5.5 was the last of the pre-7 servers and the last of the Linux versions...until now. Of course, that isn't entirely true because Claris has been using a Linux version of FileMaker Server on all of its Cloud services (both AWS and the current offering) since 2015. This Linux Cloud version wasn't available to the on-premise users but that's no longer the case. We think it was worth the wait because it opens up a lot of deployment options and some administration benefits.