The Support Group Blog

Geolocation with FileMaker Go

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?

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FileMaker Does Sudoku!

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.

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FileMaker into iCal (Without Plugins)

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.

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Looping Through Records

Robert asks:

What is the best way to create a script that loops through all selected records?

I almost always tackle it with the basic script steps:

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Creating a Watermark for Multiple Page Reports

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.

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Creating Calendars with Portal Filters in FileMaker Pro

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.

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Custom Function: EasyDate

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.

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Aggregating Filtered Portals

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.

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Dynamically naming a variable in FileMaker Pro

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.

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Find the preceding Sunday (or Monday, or…)

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.

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