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.
The Support Group Blog
DevCon is over; summer vacations are finally wrapped up.
Back in July, I presented a preview webinar of one of my DevCon presentations: FileMaker and the Cloud: Integrating with Google Apps. We are now making that webinar recording available, as well as making the sample file available for download.
UPDATE 4:
Geolocation is now natively supported in FileMaker Go 12 with the new mobile functions Location()and LocationValues(). Yay! For FileMaker Go 11, read on…
Elizabeth in San Francisco is one of many to ask this interesting FileMaker Go question:
Is there any way to get the latitude and longitude of the phone in FileMaker Go and store them in a database?
My first reaction was “unfortunately, no.” FileMaker Go can’t access the GPS features of the iPhone, and since we can’t use plug-ins with Go, there’s no opportunity to add that feature. But never say never, right?
We have a bunch of really smart FileMaker developers here at The Support Group who can do some clever stuff with FileMaker. To find out just how clever, Julien, our Development Director, ran a contest for the entire technical staff to see who could build the fastest Sudoku puzzle solver using FileMaker.
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.
If you’ve played with FileMaker Pro 11’s filtered portals at all, you may have discovered its biggest stumbling block: aggregate functions and related data. All of your calculations summarizing related records no longer reflect what appears in the filtered portal. Various solutions have been proposed using script triggers and merge variables, but they can require some foresight and maintenance. Fortunately, there’s an even easier solution for the majority of cases where you need to total up related records.