Article Tags
Click or tap one of the article tags to filter down to a smaller selection.
- Accounts
- Add-ons
- AI
- Alerts
- Analysis
- APIs
- Apple Maps
- Auto-Enter
- Barcodes
- Base64
- BaseElements Plugin
- bBox
- Breadcrumbs
- Button Bars
- Caching
- Calculations
- Calendars
- Card Windows
- Charting
- Checkboxes
- Code Editing
- Code testing
- Coding
- Color Picker
- Colors
- Conditional Formatting
- Containers
- Context Management
- Cropping
- Crypto
- CSV
- cURL
- Custom Functions
- Custom Menus
- Data API
- Data Capture
- Data processing
- Data structure
- Data Viewer
- Date Ranges
- Dates
- Debugging
- Deployment
- Developer Tools
- Dialog Boxes
- Docker
- Drag-n-Drop
- Drop-down List
- Dropbox
- Duplicates
- Duplicating records
- Encryption
- Error handling
- Events
- Excel
- ExecuteSQL
- Exporting
- External Authentication
- External Files
- Field Formatting
- Field Storage
- Fields
- File IO
- File Management
- File Sharing
- FileMaker Go
- FileMaker Server
- FileMaker Settings
- Filtering
- Find & Replace
- Find Mode
- Found Sets
- Functions
- Fundamentals
- Global Fields
- Global Variables
- Google Maps
- Google Services
- Graphics
- Grid
- Grouping
- Hierarchies
- Highlighting
- Icons
- Images
- Importing
- Indicators
- Inspector palette
- iOS
- Java/Groovy
- JavaScript
- Join Tables
- JSON
- Key fields
- Layout Design
- Layout Mode
- Layout Parts
- List function
- Logging
- Looping
- Mapping
- Marking Records
- Media Storage
- Menus
- Merge fields
- Messaging
- Microsoft Surface
- Mobile design
- MonkeyBread plug-in
- Multi-key fields
- Multi-option fields
- Naming Conventions
- Navigation
- New Release
- Node-RED
- Notifications
- Oauth
- Object management
- OCR
- OnGestureTap
- OnLayoutKeystroke
- OnObjectKeystroke
- Parsing HTML
- Perform Script on Server
- Performance
- Permissions
- Photo manipulation
- Pickers
- Pivot tables
- Pop-ups
- Popovers
- Portals
- Preferences
- Printing
- Privilege sets
- Product review
- Productivity
- Progress Bars
- PSOS
- Python
- Quick Find
- Record Locking
- Regex
- Relationship Graph
- Reporting
- REST
- Sankey
- Schema
- Script Parameters
- Script Triggers
- Scripting
- ScriptMaster
- SDK
- Searching
- Security
- Separation Model
- Set Variable
- Settings
- Shortcuts
- Sliders
- Snapshot Links
- Sorting
- Spelling
- Spreadsheets
- Startup
- Summary Fields
- SVG
- Syntax
- Syntax Highlighting
- Tab Controls
- Table View
- Tagging
- Terminology
- Text Parsing
- Themes
- Time fields
- Time Savings
- Tips
- Tools
- Transactions
- Tricks
- Twilio
- UI
- Updating
- User Interface
- Validations
- Value Lists
- vCalendar
- Virtual list
- Web Forms
- Web Scraping
- Web Services
- Web Viewers
- Windows
- XML
Our Library of Videos
FileMaker 14 was released on May 12th 2015 and this release was made for developers!
This video provides an high level overview of all the major new features and updates to FileMaker 14.
Created in conjunction with Tim Dietrich and his wonderful blog article about FileMaker 14
Does your FileMaker database track when users log in and log out? Do you know how long users are logged into your system? Do you track what they do? Are there accountability requirements in place for your system?
In computing, the term Session applies to a "semi-permanent interactive information interchange" (source Wikipedia). At its core, this concept can be easily solved by adding a table called Sessions to your database, but there's a bit more to it than that.
Beyond adding the table and fields is determining what you want to track and how it can be accessed, and by whom. In most cases, a lot of the session information collected is immutable, because it identifies who does what in the database and for how long. This session data may also need to tie into your security model and how users access database data.
In this video, I provide you with a very straight forward, although a seemingly complex system (especially if you don't know FileMaker's security settings) for managing both logins and session information. You can use strictly FileMaker managed accounts or you can authenticate based on a table within your solution. It accounts for both lax and strict security requirements.
If you've not added session management features to your database then this video will help you get started in a pretty short time. Understanding how you can use a session record to store data specific to what the user is doing in the database is also helpful to the overall usability of your solution.
It almost sounds like a line from a movie. "Dammit Jim, don't you know the calculation engine is all around us?". Within FileMaker, this is actually true. Especially, when you consider all the places where the calculation dialog box pops up and allows you to enter calculation code.
Typically, when you're entering code into a calculation, whether working within Manage Database or composing scripts, you're doing so within the context of what you're working on.
Context, in FileMaker, simply means if you're looking at a layout tied to the table which has the field you wish to reference then you're in context while creating the calculation.
For the most part, this is often necessary, as being familiar with the immediate context is needed to create the workflow you may be working on. However, there are many situation where you're simply creating code which does something.
Maybe it parses text or builds out content for a Web Viewer. Whatever the code is, which does not require context, composing that code within a calculation field or even a Watch variable within FileMaker Advanced's Data Viewer requires you to go in and out of many dialog boxes while working on the whole solution to the problem.
A better way to approach this is to use FileMaker itself to compose your FileMaker code. In this video, I showcase a tool I use for composing my own code. It serves a couple of purposes and makes it quite easy to both compose code and perform the frequent trips to research material which all developers end up making.
Personally, I'd never worked with any of the deep analysis tools too much because most of my own solutions are well understood in my own mind.
However, when considering what it must be like to dig into someone else's solution, I seriously can't imagine working without a tool like InspectorPro 5.
Vince Menanno has been working on this type of product for well over a decade if memory serves me right. This means he certainly knows his stuff and it shows within the comprehensive coverage that InspectorPro 5 provides.
While this video is a long one, at well over one hour, just knowing what you can find out about your own FileMaker solution is very enlightening. Vince could have gone longer showing me just how much information InspectorPro 5 can provide about your FileMaker solution!
People like to have things their own preferred way. Wasn't there some slogan for 40 years somewhere that said "Have it your way."? If people - developers in particular - can control the output, then life is good.
Within FileMaker, value lists are one of those areas where you may feel like you simply don't have the amount of control you should have. It's neither obvious nor inherently possible to control the order in which values are presented in anything other than an explicit value list. You know, the one where you type in the literal values.
The problem is, most value lists are not static. They're typically coming from the data within your solution. It's either all values from a given field or related values through a relationship.
FileMaker only provides you with one type of output, an ascending sorted value list according to the index of the field.
You can't programmatically add to it, nor can you subtract from it. You also can't control the sort order. At least not intuitively!
In this video, I show you a simple solution which provides all of the functionality missing above. You can combine both dynamic and static values and you can also control the order in which they are presented. Need more control over your value lists? This video and technique file will provide the answers!
It certainly would be interesting to know if more information is consumed via plain text in email, text messaging and e-books like PDFs and Kindle or via HTML on the web.
Of course, the format for the information doesn't matter as much as the content, but it sure is nice to be able to easily support a plain text format which easily integrates with the web's ubiquitous HTML. This is why Markdown was created.
Markdown, if you don't already know about, and use it, is a markup format which allows for converting plain text, which can still be read as plain text, into valid HTML.
Using it to compose content within a database, which may have anything to do with the web or even HTML emails, is just plain good sense.
The fact that integrating Markdown, within FileMaker, is so absolutely simple means you should start using it right away! In this video tutorial, I provide all the code and insight necessary to implement and use Markdown within any FileMaker database where you wish to have it. Markdown FTW!
When it comes to solving problems within FileMaker, there's nothing quite so satisfying as visually seeing the result of a cool technique. Especially if it includes a picture of yourself!
Ok, vanity aside, this video and its technique file are just such a solution I had an immediate need, and put the technique to the test. It was all about collecting a variety of images from all kinds of different sources and making their presentation unified. Images were emailed to me which came from cell phones, high quality DSLR cameras and more.
I needed to manipulate theses images by cropping them to a specific size and storing them in an optimized fashion.
Limited to only native FileMaker functionality, this is a hard thing to do. You can't drag and image around to position, you can't choose the starting point and how much of an image to crop. You also can't zoom in or out in order to achieve the ideal size.
You can, however, do all these things with the tools FileMaker provides plus a little help from either a plugin or server side installed library.
This video will walk you through all the parts and pieces in order to understand how to both implement and use some pretty cool tech for cropping images right within FileMaker!
Security is something of increasing concern these days - seriously! It seems as if we can't have a solid week pass by without hearing about some kind of significant breach. While web security has its own issues to think about, you can't just ignore your FileMaker databases.
It may seem all too easy to simply assume that FileMaker is a "low risk target" and just "hope" things are secured. In fact, it turns out that FileMaker's initial server setup is a bit insecure - at least if certain plug-ins are installed to the server without closing the hole which is the FMServer_Sample file.
Knowing the "whole" FileMaker development environment including, client, server, mobile, web and other technologies is something which comes only with time. However, with videos like this one, you can quickly come up to speed with the most critical information about how you can secure your FileMaker solutions.
Is your database running on a shared host? Does that host allow plug-ins? What happens when someone does get a copy of your file? Have you looked into FileMaker's Encryption At Rest feature? Are you doing everything you can to obscure, block and otherwise make it difficult to get into your solution?
If you can't answer all the questions above then watching this video will provide the answers and more!
FileMaker Pro is such a wonderful environment for being able to rapidly create software which is extremely powerful and functional. The fact that the database is just there, built-in and available saves an enormous amount of time over other environments. This applies to many aspects of the environment.
When you combine the ability to interact with the world’s greatest source of information distribution, the Internet, then wonderful things can happen within your solution.
In this video, I show you how to store and retrieve some of your content from the Internet. The latest trend in freely available services is something which any FileMaker developer can tap into.
Using the free version of the source control platform GitHub, I show you how you can store all kinds of information on the Internet which may be used within your FileMaker solution dynamically. Whether you’re simply storing help content or storing navigational control directly on your own FileMaker Server, knowing how to take advantage of dynamically loading content is a key piece of knowledge.
The Internet has definitely changed the world we live in and how people interact with information. Your own FileMaker solution may seem like an island until you throw a web viewer onto the layout.
As soon as you do that, you're thinking about how much easier it would be if you could just "click a button" to interact with the web site being viewed.
Fortunately, in today's Internet world, the interconnection of things is extremely pervasive. There aren't too many solutions which don't provide some type of API where you can connect with and exchange information as desired.
You can even turn your own FileMaker database into a web service which other FileMaker solutions can connect to. Ultimately, the goal is making things happen between various services. In recent versions of FileMaker, new functionality was added. The Insert from URL step allows for POSTing information and interacting with basic web services.
The limitations, however, can be bypassed if you're willing to add a bit more power to your workflow.
In this video, you'll make the best investment you can about getting started and knowing how web services can be used in FileMaker. Whether shortening urls, posting to Twitter or Facebook or connecting to Quickbooks online or Salesforce, you certainly need to know how the connections are made!