The Support Group Blog

The Support Group is excited to announce our new Advanced FileMaker classes for FileMaker 12, using the FileMaker Training Series!

The Support Group’s Advanced FileMaker I and Advanced FileMaker II classes are arranged as two separate, two-day sessions. Scheduled back-to-back to make it convenient to attend both, our Advanced training will immerse you in the essential information you need to be highly proficient in FileMaker and helps prepare you for the FileMaker 12 Certification exam by covering a number of advanced topics. These classes are taught by experienced FileMaker Authorized Trainers who themselves are also FileMaker Certified Developers.

This is my first week at The Support Group, and I get to kick it off with FileMaker 12!

FileMaker 12 is here and with it comes a new file format. However, this isn’t your father’s file format change (i.e. fp5 to fp7), full of architectural rewrites, modifying scripts, and changes in behavior. If planned for correctly, it is a fairly painless and worthwhile adventure, chalk full of performance increases and development possibilities (awesome layout themes, better and easier charting, more robust container field behavior and many more).

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.

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.

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.

Like a lot of people, I am the proud owner of a shiny new iPhone 4S.  Now, that may not sound unusual (I mean, Apple has sold MILLIONS), but the guys and gals I work with are saying “OMG!!!”

One of our customers recently needed a field to be both non-editable and scrollable in FileMaker Go.  Here’s his request:

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.