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Our Library of Videos
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!
Keeping things private, so only those who need access can access them, has been a desirable situation for as long as people have wanted to keep things private.
The only difference between the invention of invisible ink and today is trying to keep ahead of those who have the knowledge on how to access what you're trying to keep private. It's the eternal game of cat and mouse between those who seek to access what they shouldn't and those who want to keep those people out.
Within FileMaker, we now have the option of using the FileMaker 16 added Crypt* functions. This functionality, formerly only accessible through plug-ins, can now be used to securely encrypt your data within regular text fields. There's some terminology and understanding that needs to be paired with using the provided functions in order to make sure you're staying truly as secure as you possibly can when using them.
This video provides the information needed to understand what that terminology is and how to securely encrypt private data within you own FileMaker solutions.
While FileMaker may promote the low-code/no code aspects of FileMaker Pro, there's a lot to be said about knowing how to design a great system as opposed to thinking you'll end up with one by default. Especially, one which will perform under load and scale to the degree which FileMaker can.
This type of knowledge is learned and simply won't come out of the box when you just start adding fields to your database. If you need to store images, or any type of heavy media, then it may not be a good idea to carelessly start throwing container fields into your tables. In fact, there's a whole bunch of details to know about FileMaker and how it transfers data on a record level basis. As well as knowing what can be done to optimize your storage of container based data.
While you'll want things to be easy for your users for adding media, and you'll also want to build a system which will be easy to maintain and update. That's what this video is all about. An optimized approach to container storage and making it easy on yourself when you're going to be working with these types of solutions in the future.
FileMaker Pro provides a more than capable UI surface in order to design great looking user interfaces. In fact, it's the speed with which you can create that user interface which makes FileMaker Pro so appealing. The great thing about recent releases has been the flexibility of the newer layout objects.
When you combine the utility of sliders, tab panels, popovers and layout mode's various layout parts, you can further extend what you can do within FileMaker by quite a bit.
This video presents the top five tips and tricks you can accomplish with offscreen options possible with both native layout widgets and layout parts. If you're looking to increase what you know about how you can make creative combinations within FileMaker's presentation layer, then look no further!
When developing a FileMaker solution, you often want a system where the distribution of labor is such that other administrators can create and manage the users of that system. It can't always come back to the developer who has the only Full Access account.
When considering FileMaker's authentication methods, you basically have three options. Internal, external and third party. The external option is typically Active Directory on Windows or OpenDirectory on Macintosh. The newer third party options are from Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
However, with both external and third party, you have to manage users and their passwords outside of the FileMaker space. If you're wanting to use FileMaker itself to mange users and passwords, then you'll be using FileMaker's internal accounts. The trick is to have a way to manage those accounts within your database. And, that's up to you to both create and manage.
This video is about using a dedicated Users table and how you can securely manage the communication between your table of users and the actual users list within FileMaker's internal accounts. Need to provide a secure method of allowing certain users the ability to create and delete accounts? This video will have the know-how you need.
When you first start writing scripts within FileMaker, you're typically so focused on the feature or solution you're working on that you integrate it directly into the area where you're working.
It takes a bit of time and skill, however, to quickly recognize when you need to make a particular script more generalized in nature and treat it like a routine which simply needs to take input and provide some output.
Once you get to this point in your development path, you discover all kinds of opportunities where one script will serve the purpose of many. And, you may find that some of your scripts are in the range of 80 to 90 percent redundant. Possibly varying by only a few lines of code.
In this video, I present a very common pattern for many scripts. Treating them like a function and simply following a format for inbound and outbound data from that script. You'll also find a good number of tips regarding documentation, script composition and the big bonus is that we do this with a script which will give you the instant ability to send out text messages via the Twilio API!
The number of features available within FileMaker Go on a mobile device is more than icing on the cake. It's just downright cool we have access to so many features. And, all without having to write super complex code.
There is, however, some learning to do when it comes to interacting with URLs and web viewers. It turns out that many web sites, including Google's web based maps site, will change its url as you interact with the web viewer. This causes a problem when you supply an original url to the web viewer and the user expects the same result when clicking on a button which opens the external Google Maps iOS app. The url, which includes needed pieces of information, may vary depending on the interaction with the web viewer.
Fortunately, this video covers all the information you need to know when working with urls and parsing them from either web viewers or from any other location. This video will help you not only interact with the Google Maps iOS application, but also with any other external application which is to be opened from within FileMaker Pro. Need to integrate other iOS apps with your FileMaker Go app? Give this video a view!
When mobile devices first became prevalent over a decade ago, it was a pretty easy process to design for both mobile and desktop. You just made one layout for each respective device. There weren't as many variations as there is now.
In fact, these days, things are much more complex. If you decide to design for smartphone, tablet and desktop you could easily end up having to create three layouts for each possible view. This isn't something I'm personally fond of. I'd much rather limit myself to a maximum of two layouts for each possible view. One for the smaller form factor and the other as a hybrid approach for both tablet and desktop.
Fortunately, this is totally possible within FileMaker. It's a simple matter of finding the most ideal width and height which will account for the widest range of devices your solution will run on. Figuring this out, however, does take a little bit of work.
By walking you through my own process, and the tool I use for creating a hybrid design, we'll get you familiar with hybrid layout design. A design which would work on a Microsoft Surface Go, iPads and both Mac and Windows desktops. You'll establish a strong understanding of how to approach your hybrid layout design by watching this video. I also provide a few tips about working in Layout Mode with regards to making sure you create a consistent look across all of your layouts.
When you're the one creating the database, you're the one who says which data makes it in and which data doesn't. This all happens through the various methods of data validation.
Data is either considered valid or not - and this happens according to your data validation rules. If the data is valid, then everything proceeds as normal. If, however, the data isn't exactly what's required, then you get to choose what happens.
In most cases, you can let the user keep taking a whack at it until they get the right combination, or you can shuttle the user off to another part of your UI.
In this tutorial video, we take a look at the three primary tools FileMaker provides for data validation. You can use any single option or combine them to mix and match for the perfect data validation solution. We've even got a nice little text formatting mask feature which provides a great looking phone number field.
Prior to FileMaker 13 we never even had the option of performing scripted tasks where the data actually exists. The processing of a script, client side, always had, and still does, make a full round trip for all kinds of these processing activities. Many times, FileMaker does it's best to optimize whatever is being done, but it's still not as fast as executing certain things directly on the server.
With the addition of Perform Script on Server we gained a REALLY BIG performance boost by being able to perform most any script on the server.
While there are still various limitations, such as the number of simultaneous server side scripts, it's absolutely something that any serious FileMaker developer needs to know how to use.
One of the biggest issues with running server side scripts with Perform Script on Server is the fact that you need to know what's happening when the script is running, how to troubleshoot and most importantly, how to replicate the current user context. That is, the proper layout and the exact same found set to be used for processing the data. This video specifically covers how to restore the user context for processing a found set of data. If you're interested in making this process happen as quickly as possible, then using Perform Script on Server is what you should learn to use.