ISO FileMaker Magazine

With many native features in Claris/FileMaker, you may end up hitting what you "think" is a brick wall. In this case, I'm referring to the ability of sorting portals. You've only got one checkbox per portal with the options for specifying a selection of fields to sort by. True, you can choose a number of fields to sort by, but, you can't change their order dynamically or allow a user to make any changes to which fields are used.

That is, of course, unless you combine a variety of native features which will allow you to accomplish your desired results for sorting portals. In this video, we take a look at a wonderfully great technique for being able to sort any given portal on any number of fields in either direction and being the masters of our own portal sorting destiny. Need to allow end users to sort portals for maximum effect? Go no further than watching this video and using the provided technique file.

When you first develop your FileMaker solution you're typically dealing with sample and/or test data. Everything works great. It's fast and efficient and you're guessing users will just love using it. Until you hear feedback like "It takes forever to simply see a list of people to pick from."

As you scratch your head wondering why things got slow, it's likely because you didn't think about what's happening on every record of that simple little portal. Your once wonderful complex filter, which was working just fine on the 1,000 records, now chokes to death on the 10,000 records in the real world.

You ask yourself "Is there something I can do to make this faster?" and you find this video about Fast Filtering Portals. Yes, is the answer. You can optimize that portal filter such that the fewest number of CPU cycles are required in order to show a user's desired results. The trick is knowing how to make it happen with the tools we have available within FileMaker. Need to make your portal filters faster? This video will likely have the answer.

Developing software in FileMaker can be such a joy when you're able to solve so many problems so quickly. There is, however, a point where you start to solve so many problems that your solution starts to slow down and you find yourself wondering why.

Most commonly, it's the result of cumulative features compounding to make your solution slower and slower. Without careful consideration of the user interface, and how features are presented, it's easy to create a solution which starts to lag over time.

In this video, I show how portal filters really work and how to address the issue of a portal used for a very simple selection process. In most cases, your portal is only going to show a fraction of the number of fields found in its table. To this end, you must learn how to replicate the native portal filtering feature. Filtering with JavaScript/JSON is one of the most powerful ways to present data in both an efficient and faster way.

Finding your FileMaker solution is feeling slower as time goes by? You need the content covered in this video!

One of the biggest downsides of any complex FileMaker solution is the growing number of layouts and layout elements you'll have to manage. If your number of navigation (or general menu) items is both static and large, then you're going to have issues with keeping the solution well updated. Aside from this, you could have additional complexity when it comes to controlling which menu items show under certain circumstances.

While there are number of ways to make menu management easier, the best solution for most any code is to maintain it within a singular location. Allowing that code, and singular layouts, to serve your whole solution, and be flexible enough to vary when necessary, is ideal. This is exactly what this video and technique file are all about. Not only is this solution one of the most easy-to-manage solutions for a menu system, but, it's also one of the most incredibly easy menu systems I've ever created. Once you see the simplicity of management it's hard to think of going back to anything more complex.

Here's a hint about how it works. If you've used and love the flexibility of managing script steps within a script, then you'll fall in love with using Incredibly Easy Menus!

Portals can be used for essentially two different functions. Either data presentation or interaction. Of course, as you already know, you can also use a portal for both aspects of presentation and interaction as the same time.

In this video, we continue the growth of our Home Project database where we take a look at the core differences between a Master/Detail portal (Current found set) and one which uses a Self Relationship.

If you've not come across the differences between portal types, and simply selected one over the other, then hopefully, this information will help out. Using the information from this video you'll be able to make an informed decision about which version of a portal will fit any certain set of circumstances.

Personally, I've always been dismayed by how portals are positioned within the world of FileMaker instruction. When I see other developers teach about portals, they start with the primary use of portals and then stop. They talk about how portals are there to show related data and that's about it. No way! That's certainly not the end of things. Portals are one of the primary ways to present data however you wish.

If portals were limited to simply showing related data based on a normalized schema structure, then we'd never have the flexibility we have within FileMaker. If you approach portals from the mindset of using them as a display tool, then you come up with all kinds of things you can do. There are three primary uses for portals - at least, this is how I personally think about them.

In this video, I show you what those three key uses are and how to actually implement them. If you're a beginner, then understanding the native portal is certainly the starting point. From there, you progress to the power-developer who uses the Multi-Key global and VirtualList approaches to using portals. This video covers all the core uses and gives you the foundation you need for using portals within FileMaker.

When first using FileMaker's Filter Portal Records feature it's easy to get excited about how you can limit the set of records to exactly what the user needs to see. You start adding a single filter and the result feels like magic. A simple search filter using a global field will let you extra exactly the records you want. It's great!

However, when start adding more and more filters things start to get complicated really fast. You have to become super comfortable with creating complex calculations with a lot of Boolean logic. If you don't know how to use your AND and OR operators, then it can really seem daunting.

In this video we take a detailed look at how to break down a complex multi-filter approach and make it seem really easy to achieve some super advanced portal filtering. If you've ever been confused about making your portals show exactly what the user needs, especially when using multiple filtering vectors, then enjoy the understanding you'll receive from watching this video.

In FileMaker, once you've filtered a portal, which displays a subset of related data, there may be situations where you need to get that data out. A prime example is needing to further manipulate the data within a spreadsheet.

A recent solution I was developing had this exact need. I needed to filter some financial data based on a wide date range. Yet, I still needed smaller subsets, think categories, of financial data and wanted to pull that data into a spreadsheet for a separate purpose.

In order to make this even possible, we need to know the exact records being shown within the portal. There's a bit of a trick in order to make this happen such that you can get the data onto the clipboard. The great thing about FileMaker is if you can find the menu option, then you know it's a script step. Holding down a modifier key while looking at the edit menu, reveals that Copy becomes Copy All Records.

The method of loading the records to be copied, is actually quite useful in a wide variety of situations within FileMaker. If your solution ever has the need to directly copy data being viewed from a portal, then you'll find all the pieces to the puzzle in this video and technique file.

In FileMaker, some features seem like they should be an easy solve. Yet, the dynamic nature of creating something in FileMaker means its development simply can't account for all the possible things a developer might want to do.

When it comes to showing the actual count of records being shown within a filtered portal one might think the solution would already be there. However, it's not.

You have to apply some creating thinking along with a bit of inside know-how in order to correctly show the total number of records being shown within a filtered portal.

In this video, I go through the meanings of "double filtered" and how to go about showing the correct information within your user interface when you choose to use the Filter option found within the Portal setup dialog box.

This is Part 2 of a series about using the DataTables JavaScript library in order to simply pull data you wish to display and doing so within a Web Viewer.

While standard FileMaker Portals present one of the easiest methods for showing related data, it's now a viable option to simply use a Web Viewer to present data to the user. With the bi-directional support of JavaScript within FileMaker 19 and higher we can take advantage of what JavaScript does best - being fast!

In this video we focus specifically on the initialization and interaction between a Web Viewer using DataTables and how you can add buttons and features which make using DataTables a joy within FileMaker.