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Our Library of Videos
The ability to read code is similar to being able to read a foreign language. The greater your vocabulary in terms of structuring sentences, the more expressive the result.
When opening your own scripts just a few months later, if you can make quick sense of what the script does, then you've accomplished the ideal of clean reading code.
In 2010, I set out to document my own methods of coding madness. There have always been standards floating around in the world of FileMaker and personal preference always plays a role in every language used by any developer.
However, after spending a lot of time working with PHP and the content management system name Drupal, I decided I wanted the same thing for myself within FileMaker. So filemakerstandards.org was born out of that situation. Over the intervening years, I cay honestly say I appreciate the time I spent within the Drupal code and coming up with what is now very readable code within my FileMaker solutions.
Use this video as an example of how you can get around some of the shortcomings within FileMaker's unique development environment.
One of the more valuable things you can add to your data is some sort of visualization. At its most basic level, this is primarily a chart or graph which speaks about the state of your data.
Visualizations have been a hot topic in recent years because it's become so easy to access larger data sets. Spending even just a small amount of time on http://visualizing.org or http://www.informationisbeautiful.net makes your everyday UI designer salivate at all the pretty pictures which can provide insight into solution data.
With powerful JavaScript libraries like D3, http://d3js.org, readily available within a web viewer and even FileMaker's own charting tool, it simply doesn't make sense to not understand how you can easily access the data for showing a useful chart.
In this comprehensive video, we take a look at some tricks to making charting quite easy within FileMaker. It requires an understanding of ExecuteSQL, which is fully covered, but once you have the basics you start to wonder why you've not added more visualizations to your own FileMaker solutions!
Spending a lot of time, within any environment, slowly provides the nuances of that trade. Many of which you simply can't know when first getting started.
It's not just one tip or trick which makes you great. It's the 'bag of tricks' which make you good - and fast.
In this video, I go over a few of my Developer Debugging Tricks. These have been really helpful when developing for either Mobile or Server Side scripts.
While developing, you always need to know various things about the environment and the state of things for the files you're working with.
FileMaker provides this information within it's long list of Get() functions. The trick is gaining access to that information when you're working on your solution within the context of how the user will be using the software. If making things easier on yourself while debugging sounds interesting then check this video out!
For newer FileMaker developers it's easy to exclaim "Oh, cool, FileMaker takes care of that for me. Look, it reduces the image to fit my container." Coupled with the false assumption that what you see is optimized to the ideal resolution will give you nothing but a SLOW FileMaker solution.
While it's nice to have something taken care of for you, it's not always the most ideal. FileMaker can only anticipate so many situations and conditions and, as a developer, your solution may require far more control. Fortunately, we have it.
When storing images remotely, by using the File > Manage > Containers option, you'll find the ability to specify Permanent storage of thumbnails generated by FileMaker. The default is Temporary. However, if you're looking for the ultimate in control then you must take charge and generate your own thumbnails.
Beyond creating your own thumbnails, you can make your mobile solutions work even faster by using the Separation model with a local file which caches the images into a table. This local cache can load images and heavy media MUCH, MUCH FASTER than waiting for transfer from FileMaker server!
This video focuses on the first part of a two part equation when it comes to showing images within your layouts. Towards the end of the video you'll find an explanation of how to approach a Separation based local caching model of showing solution images.
If your FileMaker solution deals with any type of images, then skipping this video will cost you, and your users, a lot of time loading images from a hosted solution!
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!