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Our Library of Videos
In July of 2016, Matt was afforded the opportunity to present as a speaker at the annual FileMaker Developer's Conference. FileMaker Inc. decided to make the release of the session videos available for the general public. The session was well received with high marks given all around.
The session was a jam-packed roundup all the various things you can do with FileMaker layout objects in order to meet the objective of creating designs which work well within a small form factor. If taking advantage of FileMaker Go's highly portable convenience is one of your personal objectives, then set aside an hour of time and watch this video.
If you're looking for the sample file provided, then the link is provided below and within the video itself as well.
In FileMaker, if we only had list and form views for viewing data, then we’d probably be just fine. But, who wants to just get by with a minimal set of methods for viewing data? The ever valuable portal provides a wonderful view into whatever data you wish to show.
It can be related data, menu options, a list of users or pretty much anything. Especially, when using a portal as a Virtual List of something being held within a $$GLOBAL.VARIABLE.
The key thing to understand about portals is that FileMaker just provides you with the bare minimum. The level of expected user interaction just might not be there for your solution. For example, take a basic portal, select a given row and hit the delete key. What’s the result? The default FileMaker dialog. What if you’d like to run your own script when the delete key is hit?
How about that wonderful trash can icon, or any other icon placed in the first row in Layout mode. Well, you see them on EVERY portal row. Yuck! Take off that obvious UI distraction. Instead, make it show only when a given portal row is selected.
This video will provide you with all kinds of inside knowledge into how you can make your portal interactions just that much better!
Working with dates within FileMaker isn’t as complex as working on launching a rocket to the moon. But, as with most all technical things, it’s always good to know what’s going on under the hood. Knowing how things work allows you to implement the desired solution in the most efficient manner.
When talking about relative dates we’re talking about “Today”, “Tomorrow” and “Last Year”, not 7/6/1996. You can always instruct FileMaker to lookup a date range based on the whole year of 1995, but isn’t it nicer to simply provide the user with a menu with options relative to the current date.
In this video we take a look at the method of using relative date ranges in order to specify the starting and ending dates of those ranges. We do this using a Custom Function and some of the available triggers.
If you have any type of date-based data and you’re looking for an easy way to present things to your users, then you’ll likely find what you’re looking for in this video.
With FileMaker Pro, the application has become so much more complex than its humble beginnings. There are so many areas and aspects which you may not use until you see a good idea about how they can be used.
In this video, I showcase the Layout script trigger named OnGestureTap. It was introduced when FileMaker 13 was released along with FileMaker Go. The trigger only applies to clients which support it, which is primarily FileMaker Go on iOS and FileMaker Pro when running on a Windows compatible mobile device.
The advantages to using OnGestureTap aren’t immediately obvious if you’ve never used the trigger before. However, with a little bit of creative thinking, you’ll quickly find that it has some unique advantages on the mobile end of things. Sure, you can create a ton of buttons, but maybe you don’t have to.
For example, if you have a complex shape or image which wouldn’t normally accommodate the use of buttons, then the OnGestureTap becomes a prime candidate for making things happen based on specific clicks.
Need a simple, but not too obvious way to toggle an admin mode? OnGestureTap will help you solve that problem in your mobile solutions. Take a look at this video for some OnGestureTap specific inspiration!
When you’re faced with creating a complex piece of FileMaker code, you often break the larger problem into smaller parts. It’s always easier to tackle smaller portions of a larger problem. Even when it doesn’t seem like the problem should be that big.
In this video, you’ll discover a lot of good information about how to break a larger problem down into its smaller parts. The problem being solved is extracting all the individual pieces of a US mailing address. There are so many various methods of composing a US address. So, writing a parser in FileMaker specific calculation code can be an interesting challenge.
The video focuses on finding resources and code you can leverage and then integrating that existing code into your own FileMaker code. If you find that learning how to write better FileMaker calculations is something you’ve always been after then this video will have what you need - and more! It’s even got information about testing your FileMaker code to ensure it’s validated and comprehensive.
I can’t recall a situation where some technology from the past isn’t superseded by the new technology which replaces it. In the context of FileMaker Pro, a good example of this is your basic button.
Yes, it’s been there ever since FileMaker was created. There never was a FileMaker Pro without the button widget. Enter FileMaker 14 and Button Bars and we now have a lot of possible options. Especially when you combine the Hide object calc which arrived in FileMaker 13. You can control which segments are shown and take advantage of this is various other ways.
In this video, I show you how to make a few minor tweaks to a default Button Bar object in order to streamline one of the available FileMaker templates. It’s a great exercise in optimizing your layouts so you don’t have to copy/paste and manage as many different layout objects. You get all the same results with some added benefits provided by the Button Bar layout widget. If you’ve got a lot of layouts with a lot of buttons all aligned in a row, then this video may have a nice little trick or two when making your design considerations.
[UPDATE] Because FileMaker has updated security and privileges, you need to enable the Privilege setting of Allow URLs to run FileMaker scripts (fmurlscript) in order for this technique to work. Also note that it's now possible to modify this technique such that urls are not required. You can use the bidirectional feature of Web Viewers to execute the JavaScript. This requires enabling the setting of Allow JavaScript to perform FileMaker scripts which is a setting on each individual web viewer object.
Original post
FileMaker Pro is always advancing its collection of tools in order to accomplish more and more every day tasks. It provides default widgets such as tab panels and sliders and offers useful functions such as GetThumbnail() for resizing images.
GetThumbnail, however, will only get you so far. It will only resize an image to another size and provides no functionality regarding the manipulation of that image in any other way. This is where you need to turn to either a plug-in or JavaScript within a Web Viewer.
With a plug-in, you’re limited in terms of what you can do within the FileMaker client on mobile devices. FileMaker Go doesn’t support plug-ins. With a web viewer, you can take full advantage of the JavaScript engine embedded within the browser.
In this video, I show you how to integrate and use a freely available and very powerful javascript library called Cropper.js. If your goal is to provide an easy-to-use cropping feature within your FileMaker solution, then you won’t find a quicker result than simply copying from the provided file!
REST (Representational state transfer) has quickly become the de facto standard for communication between services and apps. Before it, came SOAP and XMLRPC, but the two buzzwords you’ll hear over and over these days are REST and JSON.
When it comes to FileMaker, you’ve always been able to do super basic REST with the Insert from URL script step. Later down the road, FileMaker added in support for the POST method of service interaction with the httpspost:// url scheme.
While the basics are always nice to have, you can’t do much beyond access public services with what FileMaker provides natively. If you’re ever going to work with a truly powerful API such as those offered by YouTube, FaceBook, Twitter, Google Apps and Vimeo, then you have to use something a bit more powerful.
Fortunately, for FileMaker developers, we have a number of possibilities. One of those options is the freely available BaseElements plugin. The plugin can access pretty much access any web service and will allow you to perform the full suite of possible interactions. It uses the very popular cURL library behind the scenes and with a little bit of knowledge, you’ll be interacting with web services in no time.
If you have the need for integrating true REST client functionality within a FileMaker solution, then you’ll be glad you watched this video!
When developing your solutions for users, you can’t always account for how easy they think things should work. You do your best, but without user testing, they’re essentially stuck with what you initially create. You can, however, put in features which you think will make usability more convenient for them.
Many times, these convenience features can be a bit complicated to implement. Fortunately, with more recent versions of FileMaker, the task of adding in such features has become much easier.
In this video, I showcase a technique for jumping to a given section within a sorted sub-summary list view. I’ve shown this feature in the past, but this implementation is specific to an alphabetical sorting of last names. It can easily be copied into any solution by simply copying one custom function, one script and a few layout elements.
Watch this video if you want a deeper understanding of how to implement this type of functionality into any FileMaker solution. Knowing how to create a recursive custom function and integrating it into useful UI widgets is what this video is all about.
One of FileMaker’s best advantages is its ability to quickly provide an interface to common data tasks. Sorting, filtering and analysis, via automated routines, make a database system better suited to routine tasks. Primarily, because you can control the user interface.
Typically, spreadsheet users don’t think in terms of disjointed data. Boiling data down into a relational model is something which takes a bit of patience and know-how. Data collection, however, is easily done within a spreadsheet because it’s super simple. Rows and Columns, rows and columns.
When distributed data collection becomes a high priority and handling scale is important, then using FileMaker Server’s Web Direct technology isn’t always the ideal solution.
If collecting data from thousands of people within a short period of time is needed, then there are only a few options when it comes to FileMaker. You can provide a distributed database file which runs on mobile and import all the individual files into one or you can use a free service like Google Forms.
The route of using Google Forms is both immediate and easy. The software, a browser, is already on the device and the problem of displaying and allowing user interaction is already solved. All you need to do is create the form and then create the system around it.
In this video, you’ll learn the ins-and-outs of using Google Forms in conjunction with a FileMaker system. If quick and easy is your goal for data collection, then it doesn’t get much easier than this!