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Our Library of Videos
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!
When FileMaker 13 was released, one of its sleeper features was Perform Script on Server. Yeah, developer’s recognized it, but didn’t really know how to value its power.
With the subsequent release of FileMaker 14, and FileMaker Go 14 in particular, the advantages of Perform Script on Server simply can’t be overlooked by anyone creating solutions within FileMaker Pro.
If your FileMaker solution has any number of users, beyond a very small number, then the performance gains can be quite significant for certain tasks.
While certain script steps like Export Field Contents cannot be used with Perform Script on Server, there is a wealth of functionality which can be harnessed through the use of server side plug-ins. Because of what you can do on the server side, there are few, if any limitations. Need to communicate with other web services via ODBC, SQL, REST, SOAP (pick your acronym)? Want to send bulk HTML email using an online service like Amazon’s SES mail sending? Need to automate a routine import which normally task just a bit too long?
Using PSoS is simply a matter of understanding what’s happening server side and knowing how to troubleshoot. Fortunately, this video will provide you with all the know-how!
Progressive disclosure. It’s the buzzword that’s been around since the mid 2000’s and a concept which has existed since software started hiding preferences. It’s recently been hitting the popular FileMaker airwaves because of the recent widgets we’ve received in FileMaker 13 & 14.
When it comes to progressive disclosure, iOS, due to the small screen size of the iPhone, needed to only show what was absolutely necessary in order to keep things clean and simple.
With the new user interaction of swiping on touch screens, new UI methods were possible in ways where the conventional mouse and screen didn’t apply.
One of the most common UI conventions on iOS is swipe to delete. This method of interaction extended to providing any variety of options by disclosing what’s possible with a given row in a list view.
While you would think this would be a simple task to accomplish, there’s a bit of a work around needed in order to make it work as expected.
This video provides the details and insight into making this feature possible within FileMaker Go on iOS.
Creating a FileMaker solution which simply works is much easier than one which performs well. Yeah! You’d like to assume that FileMaker Inc. will take care of everything for you and your FileMaker solution, no matter how you build it, will just work perfectly and as fast as possible.
Here’s the catch. You can hand a hammer to pretty much anyone. However, using it, in the most efficient manner, is a totally different story.
You must remember, the FileMaker environment knows nothing about how people are going to use your solution and the data it contains.
Shove 500kb of data into a record and when anyone accesses it they’ll get 500kb back - even if they only need to see 50kb only 80% of the time!
This is where you, the developer, enters the picture and starts to answer the hard questions. What do I show? When? To who? How?
The answers to these questions dictate how you approach the structure and design of your solution. This is combined with the little pieces of know-how you pick up from resources like this magazine. With the right tools in hand, and the knowledge of how to use them, you can create a MUCH BETTER performing solution with only a slight bit more effort.
PDF's won! The battle is over and they're the default digital document for our modern computing age - although ODF may try to disagree.* Of course, if you need to send someone a digital document, you obviously have a number of options.
You can point them to a web page - most people have access to a web browser. You can send them a Microsoft Word document and hope they have something to open it - Google Apps is free. You can always send plain text or an RTF document - they're pretty universal.
But, if you want pictures and graphs and a pretty layout to boot, then you're probably looking at PDFs as your format of choice.
Then there's real-world forms. You know, the analog to digital conversion we'll be making for years to come. The one where many organizations are mired down by forms and processes which still deal with physical paper.
While filling out a PDF form is often a simple matter of acquiring a free or inexpensive app, it's much nicer to just capture the data directly into your data warehouse right off the bat. Being able to also output the form is just what may be needed for that digital migration.
Fortunately, for us FileMaker users and developers, it's pretty darn easy to make the data capture process really easy for PDF forms. Being able to send them right back out is also a simple matter. This video walks through the process of taking a PDF form and integrating it into a FileMaker based workflow. How far you go with what is shown is only limited by your imagination!
The ability to read code is similar to being able to read a foreign language. The greater your vocabulary in terms of structuring sentences, the more expressive the result.
When opening your own scripts just a few months later, if you can make quick sense of what the script does, then you've accomplished the ideal of clean reading code.
In 2010, I set out to document my own methods of coding madness. There have always been standards floating around in the world of FileMaker and personal preference always plays a role in every language used by any developer.
However, after spending a lot of time working with PHP and the content management system name Drupal, I decided I wanted the same thing for myself within FileMaker. So filemakerstandards.org was born out of that situation. Over the intervening years, I cay honestly say I appreciate the time I spent within the Drupal code and coming up with what is now very readable code within my FileMaker solutions.
Use this video as an example of how you can get around some of the shortcomings within FileMaker's unique development environment.
One of the more valuable things you can add to your data is some sort of visualization. At its most basic level, this is primarily a chart or graph which speaks about the state of your data.
Visualizations have been a hot topic in recent years because it's become so easy to access larger data sets. Spending even just a small amount of time on http://visualizing.org or http://www.informationisbeautiful.net makes your everyday UI designer salivate at all the pretty pictures which can provide insight into solution data.
With powerful JavaScript libraries like D3, http://d3js.org, readily available within a web viewer and even FileMaker's own charting tool, it simply doesn't make sense to not understand how you can easily access the data for showing a useful chart.
In this comprehensive video, we take a look at some tricks to making charting quite easy within FileMaker. It requires an understanding of ExecuteSQL, which is fully covered, but once you have the basics you start to wonder why you've not added more visualizations to your own FileMaker solutions!
Spending a lot of time, within any environment, slowly provides the nuances of that trade. Many of which you simply can't know when first getting started.
It's not just one tip or trick which makes you great. It's the 'bag of tricks' which make you good - and fast.
In this video, I go over a few of my Developer Debugging Tricks. These have been really helpful when developing for either Mobile or Server Side scripts.
While developing, you always need to know various things about the environment and the state of things for the files you're working with.
FileMaker provides this information within it's long list of Get() functions. The trick is gaining access to that information when you're working on your solution within the context of how the user will be using the software. If making things easier on yourself while debugging sounds interesting then check this video out!
For newer FileMaker developers it's easy to exclaim "Oh, cool, FileMaker takes care of that for me. Look, it reduces the image to fit my container." Coupled with the false assumption that what you see is optimized to the ideal resolution will give you nothing but a SLOW FileMaker solution.
While it's nice to have something taken care of for you, it's not always the most ideal. FileMaker can only anticipate so many situations and conditions and, as a developer, your solution may require far more control. Fortunately, we have it.
When storing images remotely, by using the File > Manage > Containers option, you'll find the ability to specify Permanent storage of thumbnails generated by FileMaker. The default is Temporary. However, if you're looking for the ultimate in control then you must take charge and generate your own thumbnails.
Beyond creating your own thumbnails, you can make your mobile solutions work even faster by using the Separation model with a local file which caches the images into a table. This local cache can load images and heavy media MUCH, MUCH FASTER than waiting for transfer from FileMaker server!
This video focuses on the first part of a two part equation when it comes to showing images within your layouts. Towards the end of the video you'll find an explanation of how to approach a Separation based local caching model of showing solution images.
If your FileMaker solution deals with any type of images, then skipping this video will cost you, and your users, a lot of time loading images from a hosted solution!