ISO FileMaker Magazine

PDFs have become the digital equivalent of what was once printed on paper and will likely remain in use for a long time. They offer an easy way to present structured information, and FileMaker simplifies PDF generation by allowing you to save your layout's design as a PDF.

However, there are times when simply exporting FileMaker data to a PDF isn't enough — you may need to populate an existing PDF with data. The challenge can be getting your FileMaker data into a copy of the PDF. While there are external tools and plugins that help with this, there have been few native client-side solutions until recent years. To make this possible, we can leverage FileMaker's Web Viewer and its integration with a JavaScript library.

In this video, I'll show you how to populate a form-fillable PDF with data from your FileMaker solution using a Web Viewer, a JavaScript library, custom code, and any existing PDF form. Once you understand the basics of how a PDF reports its fields and types, inserting data into a PDF becomes straightforward. Mastering this integration will give you the ability to work with your own PDFs, and in some cases, you may find that creating a fillable PDF template is more efficient than exporting a PDF directly from a FileMaker layout.

One of FileMaker's most advantageous tools added in recent years is the Button Bar. It was the first way to present dynamic, calculated content directly on the screen. This removed the need for the decades-long practice of adding "yet another unstored calculation field." You can calculate something and render it right on the screen.

Then, in FileMaker 20, we got a new layout object called Layout Calculations. While these now provide the same functionality as a Button Bar, they do so without the overhead of unnecessary behind-the-scenes CSS and other extras. However, they are not fully implemented; they don't update any of their calculation references. While this will eventually be fixed, there are unique uses for Layout Calculations that allow for some really cool features—like Render Fields.

In this video, we take a look at generating temporary images for the purpose of PDF generation, which then cease to exist after the script finishes running. These Render Fields can be 100% dynamic on a record-by-record basis and can display whatever you want using an unstored field to show the result. This allows you to multi-purpose a field for multiple layouts. Let's take a look at what Render Fields can provide for your FileMaker solution.

It's always interesting to measure the metrics of how long something takes. Adding automation to a process not only saves time, but makes it less mentally taxing. This increases the sense of accomplishment and can make the process itself more gratifying.

I remember being at an amusement park and showing my kids how to measure the amount of time they might be in line by counting the amount of time it took between each time a roller coaster pulled in and how many people it accommodated. By then counting how many people were in line before them, they would know approximately how long they would be waiting.

This same type of thought process can be applied to any routine task within FileMaker. With the knowledge of the tools available, you can likely automate that task such that you reduce the total time it takes. That's the bulk of what we're doing when we're making software - simply reducing the amount of time it takes to do things.

In this video, I walk through the process of automating text capture from either a PDF or image files. FileMaker has built-in features on the Macintosh and it can certainly be accomplished within Windows as well. If there's anytime you're working with a PDF, PNG or JPG, then let's learn about the tools we have for automating the capture of data.

Claris FileMaker is continually adding new features in order to make things easier for developers. In the most recent release of version 19 we found a new function named Get ( PageCount ). This one function essentially emulates the combination of steps we needed to use to determine the total number of printed pages useful for adding a Page X of Y count to the bottom of a printable report. It's available for use within FileMaker Go, which is a big benefit.

However, while the addition of {{PageNumber}} of {{PageCount}} is super helpful, it does not address one of the more common scenarios we find in FileMaker development. That's the situation of a Multi-page report being generated from multiple different layouts. In that scenario we may have a cover page, a summary and then detailed output -all in one PDF report. All this data typically comes from different sets of related data.

So the solution we have above won't work for that type of report. On top of this, one of our standby methods of getting the page count of using the Enter Preview Mode script step simply doesn't function on FileMaker Go or Server. So, we need to create another method of accurately determining Page X of Y. Fortunately, that's what this video and technique file will provide for you. Yet another creative method of solving a common problem within Claris FileMaker. If you need to page number a multi-page report generated from multiple layouts then look no further!

It seems like it's taken decades for many businesses and government agencies to move from pushing paper into the digital age of transactions. Recently, I was reminded of this by heading into town hall and having to push a bit of paper myself. Banks and other financial institutions still actually offer paper options surprisingly. I guess being in the world of tech comes with its own biases. But, despite the seemingly slow adoption, the migration is still happening and more and more things are going pure digital. The real estate markets are finally making the switch to mostly digital and this means it's a great time to know how to take advantage of this fact.

Fortunately, storing a PDF into FileMaker is as easy as drag-n-drop or the click of a button. Getting information out of that PDF still requires some type of external software. In the FileMaker market you'll find a variety of options including both free and paid options.

In this video, I'll walk you through one of the easiest and freely available options for pulling PDF content into FileMaker. With this license-free options you'll never be scared of getting the exact content you wish to extract from any PDF.

FileMaker has had the ability to use an internal PDF writer since version 8. It has, however, not always had the ability to merge multiple PDFs into one master and make this work as seamlessly as possible. Being able to do this server side is a really BIG benefit!

In this video, we take a look at a subscriber's question about a particular printed layout issue in conjunction with taking advantage of FileMaker's best possible output options. With the ability to Save Records As PDF we can certainly make the process much more streamlined and as easy as possible.

If you need to generate a complex multipage PDF report then you'll find a lot of value in this video. We discuss what to do about page numbers and how to merge multiple PDF files into one single master. This video and technique file will get you a stronger familiarity with how to generate the type of PDF output you desire.

Is there really any question the PDF file format will be going away any time soon? Personally, I don't think so. And, neither should you. Adobe released their license to the technology in 2008 and it became an open standard for the world to use. Airlines use it for tickets, ticket companies use it for concerts and basically it's the digital equivalent of good old real-world paper for the digital world.

So what does this mean to you and your FileMaker database? Well, if you've got data within your database or you're capturing data in something like Web Direct, then knowing you can merge that data into a form fillable PDF can be invaluable. Especially if you need to put that data into a fixed format - like a PDF!

By running a server side script, and running some freely available software which is super fast an efficient, you can send out contracts, invoices, notices or even event tickets with merged in data from your FileMaker database.

Yes, you can certainly generate a PDF right from within FileMaker using your own data, but there are those situations where replicating an existing PDF just takes too much time. So just merge the data into a form fillable PDF. Plus, it just might be faster than generating it from within FileMaker!

When you think about printing these days, you probably think about saving the environment and just sending out the digital version. Of course, it turns out that many solutions still need to use the good old paper method and print something out. The great thing about having the data in a digital format beforehand is that you can preview the content before you actually hit that potentially wasteful print button.

This video covers just a few of the possible methods for previewing content created for output. You may have already discovered how easy it is to simply take a user into Preview Mode and allow them to make whatever choices FileMaker provides, but, you'll now have more options available as you can easily use a Dialog or Card window in order to present a more customized view of the possible options a user may have.

If you've struggled with automatically generating your printable reports as PDF files, and then injecting them into container fields, then you'll certainly love to learn from what this video has to offer!

FileMaker Pro has a wonderful PDF generator. In fact, one of the biggest benefits of using FileMaker for the purpose of output is that you can make any layout look exactly how you'd like and with a few script steps, you've got PDF output which will fit 95% of the situations you'll come across.

There are, however, certain situations where knowing how to generate a PDF using JavaScript, from within a Web Viewer, will give you the exact results you're looking for.

There are a number of advantages with this approach. First, it can be SUPER fast when generating the PDF and second, you can selectively decide what you want to output from within the whole of your HTML. So, if you're using HTML to present a lot of information, but only want a PDF of a portion of that HTML, then you can certainly accomplish that with this technique.

Even if you don't need the exact functionality of HTML -> PDF output there's a lot to learn from this video if you've never used JavaScript in order to call a FileMaker script and pass in some data.

PDF's won! The battle is over and they're the default digital document for our modern computing age - although ODF may try to disagree.* Of course, if you need to send someone a digital document, you obviously have a number of options.

You can point them to a web page - most people have access to a web browser. You can send them a Microsoft Word document and hope they have something to open it - Google Apps is free. You can always send plain text or an RTF document - they're pretty universal.

But, if you want pictures and graphs and a pretty layout to boot, then you're probably looking at PDFs as your format of choice.

Then there's real-world forms. You know, the analog to digital conversion we'll be making for years to come. The one where many organizations are mired down by forms and processes which still deal with physical paper.

While filling out a PDF form is often a simple matter of acquiring a free or inexpensive app, it's much nicer to just capture the data directly into your data warehouse right off the bat. Being able to also output the form is just what may be needed for that digital migration.

Fortunately, for us FileMaker users and developers, it's pretty darn easy to make the data capture process really easy for PDF forms. Being able to send them right back out is also a simple matter. This video walks through the process of taking a PDF form and integrating it into a FileMaker based workflow. How far you go with what is shown is only limited by your imagination!

*ODF (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument)