ISO FileMaker Magazine

When Add-ons were announced, it sounded like they were going to be the holy grail of transportable code within FileMaker. Thus far, I don't know exactly what the adoption rate is and if the effort is paying off for Claris. I think the concept still has legs; as you can see that the new experience Claris is putting into FileMaker currently leverages what was built.

While I have my own personal strong opinions about how Add-ons were implemented and are currently used, there's no doubt you can save a lot of time by using certain add-ons within your solution. For myself, the question tends to center around build-it-yourself or leverage someone else's efforts.

Fortunately, if you're comfortable with your own assessment skills regarding FileMaker development, you can determine if a given Add-on is worth using or not. In this week's video I take a look at installing and using an add-on download from the Claris marketplace. The experience is somewhat telling of what a new or even intermediate user might go through. It all comes down to implementation and the condition of the UI/UX. If you've not used a lot of add-ons or experienced how they might (or might not) be useful in your own development then give this video a once over.

There are so many times I hear lamentations from stalwart "FileMaker only" developers who declare that you should do everything within FileMaker and FileMaker alone. This is just crazy. It's like saying you should build an entire house with only a hammer and nails. How could you ever do that efficiently? What about the plumbing? The electrical? Well, you can't. You always have to increase what you know and become familiar with other tools and newer technologies.

In this video, I showcase a very compelling use of Javascript within a web viewer. It's because native FileMaker simply can't generate a Sankey flow diagram. FileMaker doesn't do curves, it does data. However, FileMaker can make it happen with the use of Javascript and a web viewer. The best part yet is that it's already been done for us. All you have to do is become familiar with how to modify and integrate with your own data.

That's exactly what this video does. It will teach you how to understand the implementation of this particular Javascript and give you the confidence to integrate other examples as well. If presenting your data with a very compelling visualization is something which you'd like to do, then you'll find the knowledge you need within this video.

One of the more valuable things you can add to your data is some sort of visualization. At its most basic level, this is primarily a chart or graph which speaks about the state of your data.

Visualizations have been a hot topic in recent years because it's become so easy to access larger data sets. Spending even just a small amount of time on http://visualizing.org or http://www.informationisbeautiful.net makes your everyday UI designer salivate at all the pretty pictures which can provide insight into solution data.

With powerful JavaScript libraries like D3, http://d3js.org, readily available within a web viewer and even FileMaker's own charting tool, it simply doesn't make sense to not understand how you can easily access the data for showing a useful chart.

In this comprehensive video, we take a look at some tricks to making charting quite easy within FileMaker. It requires an understanding of ExecuteSQL, which is fully covered, but once you have the basics you start to wonder why you've not added more visualizations to your own FileMaker solutions!

FileMaker does data, and it does it well - and easily. What FileMaker doesn't do "as" well is data visualization. This isn't because it couldn't. It's because they just haven't been able to focus on it as much. Sure, you can format portals, use repeating fields and use conditional formatting for all kinds of display magic, but you won't realize the same results as you could with a tool or language built specifically for data visualization.

In my humble opinion, they shouldn't work too hard on this either. This is because we have access to technology which provides far more than FileMaker ever can. FileMaker took ages before it had an integrated charting feature. Before that, you had to use a plugin and eventually you could use a remote API through a web viewer.

FileMaker has made a lot of progress with regards to the usability of its charting tool too. It's a great tool for basic data display.

However, when you need to go beyond the constraints of FileMaker's charting tool, the place you'll end up is within the web viewer. Granted, you'll need to shrug off any fear of learning HTML/CSS/JavaScript, but the benefits are well worth the journey.

In this video, I showcase how easy it is to integrate the very powerful JavaScript library D3. It's a power-user's tool which takes full advantage of everything that HTML/CSS/SVG has to offer. Within a world where data visualization is becoming a common form of data communication, this one video provides the first step of many towards taking advantage of some very powerful tools!