ISO FileMaker Magazine

Solving real world problems within FileMaker can actually be quite fun. It's a certain type of challenge which includes making something fast, efficient and easy to maintain. It's the type of thing which keeps us developers and learners going.

Like most all software products, which allow for a high degree of creativity, it boils down to knowing the feature set and what's possible. When you learn the underpinnings, and you can really wrap your head around what the limitations or consequences are, you can often come up with really creative data solutions.

In this video, I provide a solution to a problem which I had long forgotten about and previously solved. Yet, there it was, the same problem needing to be solved. The issue is related to sequencing a list of values so they sort in a specific order. When the order of values can be arbitrary and up to the user, you want to facilitate the sorting ability as easily as possible. When you try to solve this problem, you come across various issues related to how you chose to implement the UI portion.

So, with this video, I present to you the underpinnings of how I go about solving these types of problems by understanding how you can manipulate data within FileMaker. Sit back and relax as we take a look at Optimized Sequence Sorting.

While it's been around for a few years now, there aren't too many developers in the world of FileMaker who have explored Node-RED. Created by IBM and made open source in 2016, this visual programming tool may start to make waves in the FileMaker world.

A wonderfully generous developer named Lui de la Parra has made it possible to use Node-RED with FileMaker's own Data API. This means that anything in the world of Node-RED is now accessible to FileMaker. This is an amazingly powerful technology for connecting all kinds of things, both physical and virtual, into the FileMaker ecosystem.

In this video, I walk through my own personal use of Node-RED and showcase how I use it in order to capture XML data from an online store and process that data directly into FileMaker.

Whether you need to collect moisture data from physical hardware in a vineyard to interacting with any online web service or API, Node-RED, in conjunction with the Data API, will allow you to realize all kinds of powerful solutions!

As the number of web sites hosting icon collections has grown over the years, it makes little sense to have your own collection of icons custom created at a costly premium. Typically, you can find pretty much any icon you could ever want to use and in many cases, you can even modify the icon to fit your specific needs if you need a slight variation.

With the release of Creative Commons licensing, a wide array of freely available collections and the easy ability to modify icons, you can quickly create exactly what you need for most any FileMaker app.

In this video, I go over the recently released Elemental FM Icon database and I cover all the details and specifics about my own personal icon workflow. From finding the right icon to getting it into FileMaker quickly, you'll learn all kinds of information about working with SVG icons.

You may be familiar with the routine when you have multiple duplicate records in your database. You end up having to reference multiple sources. Which can be a real pain. Ultimately, you end up needing to decide which record is the master and then merging as much of the data as possible from any of the duplicates.

This is a common scenario with any multi-user database system. Where, anytime you have more than one person working on the same data, you can inevitably end up with duplicates.

There are a few ways to deal with duplicates. The first is to try to prevent them in the first place. While this is certainly possible, there are other times where routine imports come from external sources or you've simply allowed duplicates to be entered into the database.

The question now is, "How do you identify duplicates?" and how do you address the fact that our eyes can trick us when we're looking at data which appears exactly the same - yet it's not. This video will show you how to truly approach duplicates and how to deal with them by giving you full control over defining what determines a duplicate or not.