ISO FileMaker Magazine

Expanding on a recently released article about Incredibly Easy Menus, which used a Card Window and showcased minimal use of popovers, I've now created a new dedicated setup specifically for use with popovers. Using this method, you can implement the technique and manage your solution-wide popovers from a single location for code. Solution maintenance becomes vastly simplified with this approach.

Remember, our goal as developers is to create DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) code. This is exactly what this technique achieves. It creates DRY code for the various popovers you'll be using within your solution.

While some degree of context may apply to your popover menus, you can always account for context within the code and adjust as needed. If all the code is in one place, then your job just got easier.

User interface related topics are always exciting when they work really well within FileMaker. Regarding non-modal status updates, e.g. showing the user what happened or is happening, we have a few options we can use. The most simple is to toggle a value which uses a hide calculation to show/hide a given object on the layout and refresh its visibility.

When you extend this notion a good bit further, you can come up with one of the most creatives uses of many hide calculations to take advantage of a popover and slider combined to provide a very cool Status Message tool which can be leveraged solution wide. Add some sounds, a gradient, a little shadow, some styled text and things go from your basic meh to STELLAR!

In the technique and video for this particular topic I showcase the use of a variety of features in FileMaker which compliment your humble hide calculation. The easy-to-copy-paste Status Message script folder and layout object means you have a world class non-modal notification method within your file in very short time. To add to this, I've included some conversions I've made of some super valuable SVG spinners which make the solution just that much more valuable!

Moving forward with the Custom Function database project, we now have the opportunity to copy and paste our groups of custom functions. The trick to accomplishing this requires a modification to the singular copy/paste being used for a single custom function.

The database now needs to provide a list of functions, in the xml snippet format, to be copied to the clipboard. This is easily accomplished through the relationships and by modifying the original script.

If you’ve never had the problem where you needed to copy well structured data through a few relationships, then watching this video will give you some insight in the the various possible ways and the one way which may be the most simple when needing to copy that structured data to the clipboard.

As a software/database developer, one of your primary goals is making your solutions easy to use. This means users should be able to perform common queries by simply clicking buttons which run the queries automatically.

This is probably something you already do. But, the big question is this, “Do you make it easy on yourself for creating those simple queries?” Many developers will create a unique script for each of the various queries, and in some cases this is just fine. It’s when you start feeling the overwhelm of a growing list of scripts when you start to ask the really important questions.

Is it really possible to compose most of your scripted Finds using one single script? You’d better believe it is! In fact, if you abstract the searching part of your solution, it becomes very easy to create all kinds of queries, on demand, right there within the user interface.

When you abstract your search queries, you reduce the number of scripts within your solution and make it both quick and easy to automate the searching functionality of your solution.

Have you discovered the big advantages of FileMaker’s Popover objects? Not using FileMaker 13 yet? This video may have all the reasons why you should switch as quickly as possible.

In this video, I showcase how simply powerful a Popover button can be. I was deciding whether I should call the video and file “Single Step Coding” because so many of the objects within the popover only use one single script step. I decided, however, that what I was really showing was how much power you get when you pack a lot of functionality within a Popover object.

Within one little Popover, I show you how to create, edit and delete data without ever closing the popover. This is all done in a very elegant fashion making your solution seem very clean, yet quite powerful.

Because of FileMaker’s Popover objects and sliders, your user interface may need a serious overhaul. These UI elements are game changers in how users interact with solution data. Long gone are the days of “show it all” layouts!

It's great to be able to build all kinds of things within FileMaker. It's those few times when you find yourself saying "I wish FileMaker could just do such and such".

Of course, once you come to the point where you realize that FileMaker has access to all these other great technologies, you find yourself saying "I wonder how", instead of "I wish". Along the way, someone comes upon some discovery which allows you to do more with FileMaker than was previously known. Sometimes, using a hack that the programmers of FileMaker never even intended, yet there it is, ready for you to use.

It's actually pretty funny that much of what FileMaker users/developers stumble upon are unintended features by the FileMaker engineers. Then, somewhere down the road, these features become integrated as native functionality.

Well, one of those features is support for a hover event. While FileMaker doesn't offer them natively, you can certainly do this within a web browser. Combine the fact that FileMaker can trigger scripts using a url and you now have Hover Popovers and pretty much any other type of script being run as a result of hovering over a FileMaker object.

This video presents all the information needed to take advantage of hover based events. Even though it is sort of a hack.

Having access to one of the more recent and most prevalent UI patterns within FileMaker is extremely empowering. Using Popovers and portals, it's now possible to create solution wide menu systems which can be used for navigation, actions or whatever you see fit.

When you combine global variables, with the Virtual List technique and popovers, you can significantly decrease the amount of time it would normally take to maintain even a moderately complex menu system within a FileMaker solution.

It only takes a bit of creativity and foresight to implement solution wide popover menus which can be easily changed. These menus can all leverage the same elements and dynamically change based on any number of variables.

In this video, I walk you through the components which make up this powerful technique and reveal a number of powerful core methods for making it happen. Whatever level you're at, there's something to be gained by watching this video tutorial about popover menus.