ISO FileMaker Magazine

One of the great things about being a developer is finding flow. It’s that feeling when you’re cranking out code, accomplishing one task after another, and time seems to fade into the background - you’re in the zone. However, a few things can really disrupt your flow, and one of the biggest culprits is your development environment.

If your syntax highlighting doesn’t work, or your environment slows you down, productivity takes a hit. That’s why one of the best things any coder can do is optimize their development environment for efficiency.

In FileMaker, there’s no traditional “code editor” per se. Instead, there’s a dialog box called the Calculation dialog box - sometimes labeled Specify Calculation or Edit Expression, depending on the context. Regardless of the name, this one dialog is where you’ll spend most of your time coding. The goal, then, is to make this area - and the Script Workspace (known as ScriptMaker for those who remember the early days) - as efficient as possible.

In this video, I walk through the tools I use to make the FileMaker environment as coding-friendly and efficient as possible.

The ability to read code is similar to being able to read a foreign language. The greater your vocabulary in terms of structuring sentences, the more expressive the result.

When opening your own scripts just a few months later, if you can make quick sense of what the script does, then you've accomplished the ideal of clean reading code.

In 2010, I set out to document my own methods of coding madness. There have always been standards floating around in the world of FileMaker and personal preference always plays a role in every language used by any developer.

However, after spending a lot of time working with PHP and the content management system name Drupal, I decided I wanted the same thing for myself within FileMaker. So filemakerstandards.org was born out of that situation. Over the intervening years, I cay honestly say I appreciate the time I spent within the Drupal code and coming up with what is now very readable code within my FileMaker solutions.

Use this video as an example of how you can get around some of the shortcomings within FileMaker's unique development environment.