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Our Library of Videos
The great thing about FileMaker Pro is it has it’s companion app FileMaker Go. Without FileMaker Go having arrived when the mobile revolution started taking off, FileMaker might have had a hard time staying viable.
Because of FileMaker Go, we can build solutions for armies of mobile users heading out in the field. Even better, we can make easy little applications for ourselves which do cool things.
While the limitations within FileMaker are actually quite small, there will always be some burning desire to have FileMaker Go do something it simply can’t.
In my personal situation, I needed to both crop and enhance a picture prior to saving it into the database. I didn’t want to take a ton of pictures, then go back after the fact, and do my manipulations. If you can fit the steps into your workflow, then the easiest solution is to do it right then and there.
By knowing about, and understanding how to take advantage of inter-application communication, I was able to create the most ideal situation on a mobile device of being able to snap, crop, enhance and store within the smallest number of finger taps possible.
After watching this video, I’m pretty sure your eyes will be opened to how much power is held within the hands of every copy of FileMaker Go!
Users make mistakes. There’s no doubt about that. When given the opportunity, they’ll enter characters and text strings you never expected.
The easy solution to this problem is to simply control the result of what they’ve input. When capturing the input, there may be a variety of rules regarding how you want the data stored.
Do you want to store “4 pm” or 16:00:00? Is the user entering suffixes such as Jr. or Sr. into the last name field or the first name field? Should the input be super simple for an iPad and just happen within one field?
Making the input process easy, yet conforming to your storage rules is often desirable. So is performance! Do you know the performance impacts of that auto-enter calculation versus simply using a script trigger?
This video is all about cleaning up your data input. As a user adds data to the database, you can take the necessary steps to make sure it’s exactly what you want - the low impact way.
Exchanging data between systems has always been a matter of format. The output systems needs to output in the expected input format for the inbound system - and it works the same way when going in reverse.
When it comes to data interchange formats, some of the most prevalent are arguably CSV (comma separated value) and Tab delimited.
The problem with these formats however, is that one person’s CSV is not necessarily another’s. The CSV “standard” actually has no standard. There is an RFC (Request for Comments) document to act as a guideline, but it’s not an “official” standard.
For FileMaker, the standard CSV export format is lacking one very important aspect. It does not include the field names as possible headers in the resulting file.
Added to this, is the fact that you can’t just specify any encoding format on all the various export options. You are limited to the formats specified by FileMaker per export type. There are some systems where you absolutely need a more up-to-date encoding format such as UTF-8.
FileMaker also exports hard returns as the vertical tab character and this needs to be fixed for some importing operations. This video and technique file addresses all of these issues and showcases how to take advantage of some of FileMaker’s other export formats in order to make sure your data does its interchange with other systems in the expected fashion!
When it comes to accomplishing things within FileMaker Pro, some of the most sublime techniques are also the most empowering.
This particular technique, while focused on exporting calendar events, showcases some of my most favorite power-user methods for manipulating data. In my personal scenario, I was provided with a standard spreadsheet formatted to show a calendar of events broken down month-by-month.
The spreadsheet was formatted to be easily used and viewed by humans. It was not, however, formatted to easily flow into an online calendar like the wonderfully shareable and embeddable Google calendars.
So, once again, FileMaker to the rescue.
Being able to manipulate and then push and pull data is one of FileMaker’s great strengths. The utility of it’s various features make light work of converting a spreadsheet full of dates and times and pushing that data into a format easily used by Google Calendar.
Whether you’re working with calendar events or not, this video will provide you with a wealth of information about how easy it is to format data into standardized formats.
FileMaker 14 introduced a new layout object called a Button Bar. It’s essentially a wrapper around multiple buttons which can be used as either a conventional button or a popover menu.
The great thing about button bars is they respect a hierarchy. If you hide the whole Button Bar, then nothing shows. If you hide just one segment, which is what one individual button within the bar is called, then the bar will retain its size and simply not show the given segment.
All button segments have style properties for icons, text and allow you to use Conditional Formatting. When combined with the ability to hide/show whole bars, or any given segment, you can use Button Bars for more than just, well, a Button Bar.
So what to do with this knowledge? How about create a very flexible and portable user notification technique. That’s what this video is about. Using Button Bars creatively in order to provide user feedback within the user interface.
When QR codes started gaining traction, the world’s developers were full of ideas about how they could be used. Large real-world multi-player games were even created and they started showing up on all kinds of packaging, products and marketing.
It was thought that the world would communicate via their mobile devices and go scan crazy when it came to QR codes.
The reality, however, was that while they are used quite a bit within industry and in many different ways, their general use is still somewhat lackluster.
Regardless, however, of how the general public feels about QR codes, we can take full advantage of them within our own FileMaker solutions. When you think a bit creatively, and you use knowledge about cryptographic hashing recently released within FileMaker 13, you can devise some pretty useful systems for interaction amongst groups of people.
In this video, I showcase a system being put in place for helping people to register for events or even log into FileMaker systems in order to update their personal information. With the content shown in this video, the sky’s the limit in terms of how you start to use QR codes in your own FileMaker solutions!
When FileMaker 13 was released, one of its sleeper features was Perform Script on Server. Yeah, developer’s recognized it, but didn’t really know how to value its power.
With the subsequent release of FileMaker 14, and FileMaker Go 14 in particular, the advantages of Perform Script on Server simply can’t be overlooked by anyone creating solutions within FileMaker Pro.
If your FileMaker solution has any number of users, beyond a very small number, then the performance gains can be quite significant for certain tasks.
While certain script steps like Export Field Contents cannot be used with Perform Script on Server, there is a wealth of functionality which can be harnessed through the use of server side plug-ins. Because of what you can do on the server side, there are few, if any limitations. Need to communicate with other web services via ODBC, SQL, REST, SOAP (pick your acronym)? Want to send bulk HTML email using an online service like Amazon’s SES mail sending? Need to automate a routine import which normally task just a bit too long?
Using PSoS is simply a matter of understanding what’s happening server side and knowing how to troubleshoot. Fortunately, this video will provide you with all the know-how!
Progressive disclosure. It’s the buzzword that’s been around since the mid 2000’s and a concept which has existed since software started hiding preferences. It’s recently been hitting the popular FileMaker airwaves because of the recent widgets we’ve received in FileMaker 13 & 14.
When it comes to progressive disclosure, iOS, due to the small screen size of the iPhone, needed to only show what was absolutely necessary in order to keep things clean and simple.
With the new user interaction of swiping on touch screens, new UI methods were possible in ways where the conventional mouse and screen didn’t apply.
One of the most common UI conventions on iOS is swipe to delete. This method of interaction extended to providing any variety of options by disclosing what’s possible with a given row in a list view.
While you would think this would be a simple task to accomplish, there’s a bit of a work around needed in order to make it work as expected.
This video provides the details and insight into making this feature possible within FileMaker Go on iOS.
Creating a FileMaker solution which simply works is much easier than one which performs well. Yeah! You’d like to assume that FileMaker Inc. will take care of everything for you and your FileMaker solution, no matter how you build it, will just work perfectly and as fast as possible.
Here’s the catch. You can hand a hammer to pretty much anyone. However, using it, in the most efficient manner, is a totally different story.
You must remember, the FileMaker environment knows nothing about how people are going to use your solution and the data it contains.
Shove 500kb of data into a record and when anyone accesses it they’ll get 500kb back - even if they only need to see 50kb only 80% of the time!
This is where you, the developer, enters the picture and starts to answer the hard questions. What do I show? When? To who? How?
The answers to these questions dictate how you approach the structure and design of your solution. This is combined with the little pieces of know-how you pick up from resources like this magazine. With the right tools in hand, and the knowledge of how to use them, you can create a MUCH BETTER performing solution with only a slight bit more effort.
PDF's won! The battle is over and they're the default digital document for our modern computing age - although ODF may try to disagree.* Of course, if you need to send someone a digital document, you obviously have a number of options.
You can point them to a web page - most people have access to a web browser. You can send them a Microsoft Word document and hope they have something to open it - Google Apps is free. You can always send plain text or an RTF document - they're pretty universal.
But, if you want pictures and graphs and a pretty layout to boot, then you're probably looking at PDFs as your format of choice.
Then there's real-world forms. You know, the analog to digital conversion we'll be making for years to come. The one where many organizations are mired down by forms and processes which still deal with physical paper.
While filling out a PDF form is often a simple matter of acquiring a free or inexpensive app, it's much nicer to just capture the data directly into your data warehouse right off the bat. Being able to also output the form is just what may be needed for that digital migration.
Fortunately, for us FileMaker users and developers, it's pretty darn easy to make the data capture process really easy for PDF forms. Being able to send them right back out is also a simple matter. This video walks through the process of taking a PDF form and integrating it into a FileMaker based workflow. How far you go with what is shown is only limited by your imagination!