ISO FileMaker Magazine

If your FileMaker solution doesn't currently have any type of error handling built in, there may come a day when you need to know what's going on. Especially when things don't work as expected. You see, here's the crux of the situation. While you can certainly control the behavior of your solution and how things work on the inside, you can't control the external operating system and other aspects beyond the guts of your own solution.

What this means is your Export Field or your Import Records script step may break on one given client for some reason or another. You've also built logic into your solution in which inevitable dependencies exist. If script A must run successfully, in order for the follow-on script B to run as well, you need to trap for any possible errors which may happen within script A. This is when you need your own error handling for your solution - beyond FileMaker's error handling for it's own environment.

Since error handling is one of the more boring aspects of programming, it's beneficial to have an easy-to-use and quick-to-implement system which can be added to any FileMaker solution. This technique file and video provides just such a solution!

Pop-up menus are the de facto widget for making selections from multi-option fields on mobile devices. Sure, checkboxes are possible, but they take up as much space as you have items. Not very efficient given the limited space on smartphones and tablets.

So, on mobile, the two most viable solutions for making multiple selections for a single field are either portals or a pop-up menu. You can use an additional window as well, but that's a technique for another day.

FileMaker has long supported making multiple selections in a pop-up menu via the Shift modifier key. In FileMaker 11, however, this feature went way on Mac OS X. The feature went away but the functionality did not. In fact, we still need this functionality for keeping things nice and compact in mobile only or hybrid designs.

This video showcases a wonderful technique, which works on both desktop and mobile, for supporting a default multi-selection option on fields formatted as pop-up menus.

If you're tight on space and need to offer more than one selection within the same field then look no further than this powerful technique!

So you've integrated support for managing notes, and you'd really like your users to be able to view the full length of each note. The problem is FileMaker's portal object.

With portals, you get a fixed field width and height and it's the same for all related records shown within the portal. Sometimes it will chop the text off and other times it will show a lot of extra white space. Never fear, it's the wonderful web viewer to the rescue.

The trusty web viewer not only provides the dynamic resizing of objects based on how it renders content, but comes included with the powerful support of Javascript.

"But I don't want to learn Javascript." you say. Never fear, it's just one function and the rest is up to how you integrate within FileMaker.

This video will provide you with the technique file and content necessary to manage notes in a very effective manner. Learn the concepts used, and you'll expand your knowledge of FileMaker to a level where you can leverage that knowledge across many other aspects of your development!

For the new user to FileMaker, it seems so easy to simply create a field, make a value list containing "Yes" and "No" and set the field format to Checkboxes.

It sounds so simple right?

Well, this seemingly simple desire tends to trick more new developers than I'd like. After receiving an email about this very goal, I decided to create a video about how I approach single checkboxes.

In the past, I've created videos about temporary checkboxes using just global variables, but I figured I should elaborate on the data storage of the checkbox and how you can creatively display a checkbox when you opt not to use graphics.

I should mention, however, because of the font differences between Windows and Macintosh, this solution isn't as ideal as graphics. Especially, when designing for cross-platform, primarily because of the rendering differences between the two. But, when used for FileMaker Go on iPad or iPhone, or limited to one specific platform, this solution is quite ideal!