The Support Group Blog

The FileMaker Send Mail script step is a valuable function for developers, but in recent years has become unreliable. Many conventional email service providers have gradually made using Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) relays more complicated, primarily due to security concerns. Here at The Support Group, we've been transitioning clients to Gmail or Azure Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), depending on their email provider. Another option is SendGrid from Twilio, but that's a different blog post. Now, FileMaker 2023 offers an enhancement to our Send Mail options, a game changer, in our opinion.

Open Authorization (OAuth) is a widely used framework that allows different applications to interact with one another. It's most appreciated for its ability to facilitate those interactions without having to share access credentials. Instead, a private key verifies the user's identity. It's relatively easy to implement and maintain.

FileMaker 2023 includes several useful new features, like Perform Script On Server with Callback. Another noteworthy feature we want to explore is a new script trigger, OnWindowTransaction. We can find this script trigger within the list of script triggers that appear within the File Options selection of the active FileMaker file.

Claris has departed from the tradition of sequentially numbering its product releases. They decided to use the year of the release in the name of their latest release – FileMaker 2023. Yet, a word to the wise, while the name of the software is FileMaker 2023, the version number internally to the software is FileMaker 20.x.x.  

Claris FileMaker 2023 includes many new features. The Perform Script On Server with Callback (PSOSWC) function is arguably the most exciting new script function we've seen in years.

Welcome back to the third and final part of our FileMaker project management blog series. We reviewed the various types of project management solutions and established a basic set of requirements and the beginnings of an ERD for the system in part one. Then we brainstormed the workflow for our system and used a few whiteboards to make preliminary sketches of how the solution will work. Finally, we will build the application and flesh out a FileMaker project management template.

As a reminder, we're working on project tracking software that we can build using the FileMaker platform. Our FileMaker Project Management Solution blog post discussed some fundamental functionality many off-the-shelf project management applications offer and their shortcomings for users with unique workflows.

Over the years, we've worked on various project management solutions of different shapes and sizes. Yet, building a project management application seems strange, considering how many off-the-shelf project management applications are currently available – Basecamp, Jira, Trello, and monday.com, to name a few. Of course, each of these programs has its strengths, but the issue that many of our clients have is that the model those solutions address doesn't quite fit how they specifically do business.  

As we discussed in our previous blog post, FileMaker has released a new feature set involving transactions. The new scripts allow us to send the changes we make to a record to the server in aggregate. So, we can batch all our changes together in one transaction and send that to the server. 

If you read our blog regularly, you might remember we created a test file to demonstrate a technique on how to create multiple records at one time. We can also use the new transaction scripts to accomplish this task. For example, instead of creating 10,000 records in a loop one at a time, thereby producing 10,000 individual transactions, we should be able to submit those 10,000 new records as a single transaction. 

Claris released a new version of FileMaker, and it’s pretty exciting. Of course, the usual list of bug fixes and minor enhancements to the platform accompanied the update. Nonetheless, there's at least one outstanding new feature: Transactions.  

In the database world, a transaction is any operation on an entity. In FileMaker world, it represents any change made to a record. Previously, we made most of our changes to our records, one record and one field at a time. And, when we clicked out of the field in FileMaker, it committed the record, thereby completing an operation for that entity - in other words, performing a transaction. This function helps keep all our data in sync with other users who concurrently access the database. But it can impede the performance of our system, especially in a wide area network (WAN) environment with poor network speed or high latency.  

In our previous blog posts, we reviewed the following:

• What a CRM is
• The requirements for a basic CRM
• How to create an entity relationship diagram (ERD) for that CRM
• How to create a CRM database in FileMaker

In this final post, we will review how to design a FileMaker CRM to finish up the system.

So, after creating the tables, fields, and relationships, the only thing left is to design the user interface (UI). Again, aiming for the most straightforward route here, our first inclination is to create a master-detail layout for each module – Contacts, Companies, and Interactions. But as we think about it, interactions are always related to a contact record; therefore, those details will live within the Contacts screen.  

In our previous blog post, we reviewed what a customer relationship management (CRM) system is and put together the requirements for a basic CRM. Yet, we’re not quite ready to start writing code. Next, we need to draw up an entity relationship diagram - ERD for short. In database land, this is a map of all the buckets of information that we will track and the connected data among them. As part of this process, we will look for places to normalize the data. Normalizing means we will look for instances where we can avoid entering the same data in two different areas.