ISO FileMaker Magazine

Within FileMaker development, there are a variety of must-know features and methods for doing certain things. You’ll be hard pressed to find these critical bits of info within the provided help.

However, these are nuances which come with the environment and really only make sense once you start to integrate them into your user interfaces. One of these “hidden” features is known as Multi-key relationships.

Using multi-key relationships, you can present data within the user interface which is derived from a variety of tables. There’s really no limit on how much data you can show from however many tables you desire. The limitation is truly only your imagination about how the data should be presented.

While the implementation is super easy, the understanding behind how things work is what will move your FileMaker solutions to the next level.

FileMaker Pro, beyond your normal join table, offers a unique method of storing collections, or groups, of items. You can do this with what is called a multi-key field. This isn’t to be confused with a compound-key, which is a primary key composed of multiple different values.

Using a multi-key field we can store a collection of custom functions within our Custom Function database. This makes it possible to start the process of collecting groups of functions together and then adding a feature so we can copy them as a group.

Of course, the trick to adding any complex functionality is to make it easy for the user while staying maintainable for us as the developers. This will be done within a standard FileMaker Popover layout object.

This video walks through the process and parts of adding a grouping or collections based feature. While we’re adding it within the context of custom functions, this is a feature you’ll find using over and over again no matter what the database is about.