ISO FileMaker Magazine

While Claris/FileMaker offers a convenient Duplicate Record menu option, of which there's always a companion script step for most menus, there's more to the equation than simply duplicating your primary record. In fact, in most situations, it is necessary to duplicate both parent and related child records. You will likely need to duplicate a complete set of records to address the entire entity. For example, think of the relationship between Order, Line Items, Ship Address, and so on, in order for a customer to place a duplicate order.

To accomplish this, there are various native methods available, often involving multiple GTRR (Go to Related Record) steps. Additionally, within your script, you will need to carry a newly created primary key to all the newly created child records. Therefore, the question arises: "What happens when you need to duplicate a large number of record sets?" This was the question posed by Daniel Wood, who proceeded to test and document the methods and their benchmarked results in an article published on their blog at the FileMaker consultancy Digital Fusion.

When confronting this same question, there is a method that I personally favor and know to be quite fast, and I was eager to see how it would perform. I integrated this method into Daniel's file and discovered that by utilizing a plug-in, a significant speedup can be achieved. This article focuses on the fundamentals of how this technique works and provides guidance on its implementation in your own solutions. I'd like to express my gratitude to Daniel for his hard work and for granting permission to distribute a modified version of his file.

When starting out with FileMaker, there's rarely the situation where you receive any "before you get started" advice. This is because working in FileMaker is like picking up a blank canvas and having someone say "Go for it! Paint something."

Essentially, you need to know what the tools are, how you use them, what can be accomplished and how certain decisions might affect you. So, when it comes to field indexing, you might not know the default settings could potentially cause your solution to become bigger than it should - without any benefit to performance.

While searching an indexed field vs. an unindexed one becomes somewhat obvious - the search may be slower than expected - it's the fact that every field, by default, can optionally enable its index that makes things interesting with regards to file size and, to a certain degree, some efficiency.

In this video I break down exactly how you can see what is going on with each specific field index and what the true difference is between a value index and a word index. You may even find out that your primary key fields are actually able to index more than they really should!

With many native features in Claris/FileMaker, you may end up hitting what you "think" is a brick wall. In this case, I'm referring to the ability of sorting portals. You've only got one checkbox per portal with the options for specifying a selection of fields to sort by. True, you can choose a number of fields to sort by, but, you can't change their order dynamically or allow a user to make any changes to which fields are used.

That is, of course, unless you combine a variety of native features which will allow you to accomplish your desired results for sorting portals. In this video, we take a look at a wonderfully great technique for being able to sort any given portal on any number of fields in either direction and being the masters of our own portal sorting destiny. Need to allow end users to sort portals for maximum effect? Go no further than watching this video and using the provided technique file.

Sometimes, it's the little things you learn that make working with Claris/FileMaker so enjoyable. Things like making a Button Bar balanced when hiding segments and not having to use any scripts or extra code (unless desired) to do it.

This video presents a great little technique of how you can use a Hide calculation on your button bar segments yet still maintain the same relative button size. With this little bit of know-how, you can easily stack various button bars and provide all kinds of progressive disclosure of various solution features.

Add this simple trick to your arsenal of great UI tricks for Claris/FileMaker.