The Support Group Blog

This article originally appeared in our old Get ( Answers ) newsletter.  I recently heard again from Marcelo, announcing his new consulting company and FileMaker 11 certification (congrats!), and thought I should update this.  With some new features introduced in FileMaker 10, this technique is even easier to implement.

UPDATE 2:

The webinar recording is now available (requires the WebEx WRF Player).

UPDATE:

If you missed today’s webinar with James, a recording should be available shortly.  We’ll update this post once it goes live.  Thanks to all that attended!  If you had a question for James and didn’t get a chance to get it answered, post in here in the comments for him.

Al asks:

Any hints on how to get appointments into iCal or Google calendars easily - without plug-ins? Mac would be fine, as I want this available on iPhone in the end.

Easy?  Maybe…  it depends on what you want to be able to do with it once it’s in iCal.

Robert asks:

I almost always tackle it with the basic script steps:

Hi, I’m Julien Lafleur, the director of development here at The Support Group.  I’ve been working with FileMaker for well over a decade (in fact I just passed my 10 year anniversary with TSG!), and I’m continually surprised by the many little challenges posed by our customers, and the many creative ways they can be solved.

Have you ever wanted to display event records in a calendar format?  Of course you have!  And FileMaker Pro 11 makes this so much easier with filtered portals.

FileMaker Pro 11’s new OnObjectValidate script trigger provides us with the ability to control and massage data in ways we couldn’t before.  While this trigger is often thought of as a way of adding additional limitations and restrictions on data entry beyond the built-in validation options, you can also use it to ease and allow more flexible data entry.

I’ll admit it: prior to FileMaker Pro 10, I didn’t give much thought to providing users with the ability to view a layout as a table as opposed to a list.  List view seemed to have so much more to offer.  Formatting was easier to control, you didn’t have to take extra steps to ensure the header and footer would appear, and if, like me, you tend to give your fields arcane “database-y” names like ct_nameFull_lfm instead of Full Name, you didn’t have to worry about those names appearing in the column headers.  About the only thing table view had going for it was resizable columns.

One of the things I find I need to do frequently is create a variable using a calculated name.  For example, I can use the FieldNames function to get the list of fields on a layout. I might want to then declare a number of variables that have the same names as the fields, and then populate them with those fields’ values.  Later, I can loop through the fields again, perhaps updating them with a Set Field By Name step, and reference the variable with the similar name.

Often we are asked to produce reports that show total sales (or student attendance, or whatnot) by week. In order to produce these reports, we need some value that allows us to group our records by week. What we can use is the Sunday—the start of our week—that occurs before our activity date.