ISO FileMaker Magazine

Security. While it isn't as sexy as a nice UI widget or as crafty as a really cool scripted workflow, setting up your security is something you must consider before any database deployment. When it comes to security, you can't miss a beat. If you do, then that one attack vector might be the one that bites you. And, unless your FileMaker solution is never going to connect with the network at large, knowing who can do what within your system is an essential requirement of security.

Getting to know FileMaker's privilege sets, and how they work, is one thing. But, weaving this knowledge into a system which provides a good degree of flexibility is another. If you're interested in the User/Group/World permissions model, then applying it to your FileMaker solution isn't too hard. You just need know which fields to add and how to make them interact with the rest of the security model in order to accomplish your intended goal.

This video, and the companion file that comes with it, will provide you with the best starting point possible for figuring out how you might want to integrate your security objectives. If you've never quite gotten FileMaker's security under your belt, then give this video and file a good look over.

Learning from a technology you don't already understand, while receiving an immediate benefit, is one of my driving reasons for creating content. In this two part series, I dig into the depths of understanding the JavaScript mechanisms natively available to FileMaker developers and learners.

This first video focuses on the implementation of an internal cropping tool which uses a web viewer to provide the interaction and actual cropping. The demo file and video show you how to implement the JS libraries required and how to use the technology available.

Understanding how to crop, and also the distinction of what you want to crop versus what you need to crop, is an important step for some high impact database systems which may use larger sized images. If you're looking for a better understanding of JavaScript and also how to crop and image directly within FileMaker then I'm sure these videos will cover what you need to know.

Within the world of FileMaker development, there are always those golden gems which become the hallmarks of "how to do something" - despite there often being more than one way to solve a problem. For managing lists of data, prior to the existence of the While function, the go-to custom function is CustomList. When it comes to variable output display using a portal you'll almost always reference Virtual List as the commonly understood approach.

When it comes to saving user state, there's always been a number of ways accomplish this. But, for my part, I'm going to declare Layout Variables as the way to solve many issues when it comes to saving user state in FileMaker.

While the term "Layout Variables" can apply to either locally scoped variables or global ones used within the layout, the concept is such that you're using variables to store things for the specific layout the user is on. When it comes to saving state, whether for the specific session or in order to persist, there has to be a simple and easy way to store, reference and retrieve these values and I think that solution is finally here. In this video, I showcase the Custom Functions and methods I use to implement Layout Variables.

If your FileMaker solution has a need to maintain state and make it easy to both store and restore global variables used for the user interface, then you simply must watch this video.

Communication amongst solution users is often a desirable feature. While many companies will standardize on generalized options such as Slack, it's not your only option when it comes to messaging within a FileMaker solution.

In the past, there've been a number "FileMaker only" solutions which take advantage of FileMaker's constant polling of the main data store. However, these solutions pale in comparison to what is available today. With the prevalence of super powerful browser-based Javascript solutions, we can simply use a Web Viewer and integrate directly into FileMaker.

The question, however, is which one do you pick and how can you test things out before making your choice? That's what's covered in this video. How you can test out all kinds of different software integrations within FileMaker. Also, how you can determine if FileMaker's Web Viewer can handle what the software is designed to do.