ISO FileMaker Magazine

FileMaker 16 added a variety of new features designed to support its new ability to interact with web services using JSON. One of those supporting features was the addition of more cryptographic functionality.

Previously, the only native feature available was an MD5 hash. At the time of it being added, it was already out of fashion as a security based feature, but it could be used to compare two things against each other.

By adding new encryption and decryption capabilities, we are now able to encrypt and decrypt data directly within the database itself. This means we can, if desired (and your security policies allow it), store things like credit cards and other sensitive information. While the functions themselves are pretty straight-forward, it’s always nice to know the ins-and-outs of how to implement a feature properly.

Over the years, FileMaker has added, enhanced and modified various areas of the development platform. One of the areas which has seen a big transition is the way favorites are managed. If you're a long-time developer of FileMaker solutions, then one of the more recent changes in FileMaker 16 may be a bit disconcerting.

The change was to how favorites are managed. In fact, they simply took out the menu option and sorta left you hanging. The "Manage favorites..." menu is no longer present within FileMaker 16. If you were used to heading to that menu item in order to reorder, add or remove favorites, then your access to the dialog was recently cut off.

It was replaced a while back, but isn't all that obvious if you've not used the new Launch Center's cute little "star" (favorite) icons. This now pretty much the only way to manage favorite files and hosts. Fortunately, once you get used to the new way of doing things, you can easily take back control over your favorite hosts and files.

FileMaker Pro, beyond your normal join table, offers a unique method of storing collections, or groups, of items. You can do this with what is called a multi-key field. This isn’t to be confused with a compound-key, which is a primary key composed of multiple different values.

Using a multi-key field we can store a collection of custom functions within our Custom Function database. This makes it possible to start the process of collecting groups of functions together and then adding a feature so we can copy them as a group.

Of course, the trick to adding any complex functionality is to make it easy for the user while staying maintainable for us as the developers. This will be done within a standard FileMaker Popover layout object.

This video walks through the process and parts of adding a grouping or collections based feature. While we’re adding it within the context of custom functions, this is a feature you’ll find using over and over again no matter what the database is about.

As with visiting any new country where they speak a different language, if you can’t speak it, then it’s pretty hard to communicate. The same thing applies to intercommunication between technical systems. If you don’t take the time to learn the format being used, then you obviously won’t get very far.

In this video, we take a look at processing JSON from GitHub’s API. It’s one of the last places we’re looking for FileMaker Custom functions. GitHub is a web site which hosts hundreds of thousands of code repositories. These code repositories represent many hundreds of thousands of coding hours. To not take advantage of any pre-existing resources seems a bit silly.

The trick to working with any cloud based resource is to simply learn what questions to ask and how to process the answers you get back. Of course, there’s always that critical piece of know-how which is all about processing the data in the first place. If you’ve never written a recursive FileMaker script, then you’ll certainly see some in action when dissecting the script in this version of our Custom Function database!