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Our Library of Videos
The security of your FileMaker data should always be a top priority. If you don’t know how to implement FileMaker’s Privilege Sets, then you need to learn as quickly as possible.
While the dialogs for security can seem a bit obscure and difficult, it only takes a few trips in and out to get a feel for how you can lock things down.
In this video, I showcase a simple system I created which covers topics such as Granting full access to scripts and why, locking off security related fields, using Global fields and local fields for temporary access escalation and other security related items dealing with privilege sets.
More and more these days, we find ourselves jumping back and forth between desktop computers and using our increasingly convenient mobile devices. At least, that’s how it’s been with many of my personal FileMaker projects./Users/matt/Desktop/filemaker-desktop-mobile-design.png
While designing for each target device, in an ideal world, is a luxury we’d like to afford, there just isn’t an unlimited supply of time and money.
The solution is to create a hybrid design which will work as well on mobile as it does on desktop. In order to accomplish this, you have to leave some of your “desktop ways” behind and adopt some of the minimalism you find within mobile design.
While FileMaker is adding more and more for the mobile platform, we still have a somewhat limited set of field widgets for interacting with data. At least as it relates to portals and related data. On mobile, a portal typically needs to be scrollable via a finger or thumb flick, yet on desktop we tend to want to enter/edit data quickly because of the tab key and physical keyboard access.
Striking a balance is the goal, and it can certainly be accomplished with the tools we have today. This video is about a common pattern for input of data. It covers a number of tips and tricks about keeping data presentation minimal yet exposing the necessary functionality.
Creating a user interface, which looks good at any resolution, was never a concern before there were smartphones. It was when they started packing more and more pixels within the same area that graphics started having issues. With the popular formats of PNG and JPEG, you’re limited in terms of displaying them. The limit is the maximum size/resolution at which the file is exported at. From there, you can only go down, scaling up will cause the obvious pixelation we’re familiar with. So it’s always been a fine balance between the size of the file and the resolution desired.
With FileMaker 14 and higher, they added support for the popular SVG file format. It’s actually not a file format as much as it is a text format. You see, SVG is just XML which can be parsed and rendered as needed. With FileMaker adding support for SVG within buttons, we can now take advantage of this very slim format.
The benefits of understanding how FileMaker has implemented support for SVG allows for all kinds of creative tricks. With the right settings, you can optionally change the color of an SVG icon programmatically. If you know you can hide parts of that icon then you can do even more UI trickery.
This video is all about understanding how you can manipulate and change the text content of an SVG file. It requires some confidence with text parsing, but once you get the file into a FileMaker field, you can manipulate to your heart’s content.
When you attempt to translate human interaction from the real world into a database, that translation isn’t always the most ideal.
Within a database, you’re storing data within rows and columns and the real world isn’t always laid out so neatly. This is where using an image or graphic fills the gap and shortens that bridge of understanding for the user.
A good example would be a dental office and scheduling appointments within 2 hour blocks of time throughout the day. The office has a physical layout and a fixed number of stations. True, your standard calendaring application can take care of this, however, the person interacting with that data has to interpret it and translate it into understanding which relates to the physical world in which they are interacting with the chairs and equipment. What if certain procedures require certain facilities - as they most often do?
The ideal solution then, in many cases, is to allow a person to interact with that data in the most visually accurate way - with an image or graphic. The problem is, people move things around. But, what if this process can be accomplished super easily - why not go for the image?
In this video, I showcase how you can easily take the output of a standard SVG graphic and provide a level of interaction which allows for solving a lot of real-world data translation issues. If you like making “easy-to-use” solutions, then make sure and add this knowledge to your FileMaker tool belt!
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!