ISO FileMaker Magazine

In the world of FileMaker solutions, it's almost inevitable that a solution will experience significant growth during the initial stages, followed by a transition to the everyday pace of normal use. When developing those initial features, one of your key objectives should be to emphasize reuse and repurposing. As is often the case, the less you have to manage, the easier it becomes to maintain and update your solution. There's less to re-learn, and your scripts, layouts, calculations, and other elements are more straightforward to locate and update.

However, if you tend to create numerous one-off duplicates within your code, you may end up with a collection of disparate elements that require attention or become obscured over time as additional features are added, potentially duplicating some earlier functionality. In complex solutions, it's not uncommon to become confused about what was implemented earlier and inadvertently replicate entire feature sets.

In such scenarios, you're left with the burden of either consolidation or selecting one implementation to retain while removing the others. A more effective approach is to proceed by making aspects of your solution universal and the default method for accessing specific functionality. This is where creating universal pickers that apply solution-wide can yield substantial benefits. In this video, we address precisely this situation and guide you on how to approach their implementation.

One of the major challenges that any solution or developer encounters is effectively managing the growth of their solution. As the solution expands, the issue of "dilapidated code" arises. This refers to code that either gets replaced or continues to be used without being updated to leverage the latest enhancements in FileMaker. Consequently, a significant portion of the code may become obsolete over time.

One of the most effective solutions to tackle this problem is the use of utility scripts or code that addresses a wide range of use cases. This video showcases the implementation of a commonly used pattern, namely, obtaining user confirmation to ensure that their intended actions align with the expected outcome. By employing a utility script called "Confirmation Prompt", we can prompt users not only for record deletions but also for various other situations.

This powerful utility script allows us to manage a variety of user interactions, such as setting a temporary $$UI.VARIABLE or modifying the value of a hidden field. Furthermore, the video presents one of the best approaches to learning and utilizing JSON, in case you haven't embarked on that journey yet. JSON proves to be an excellent method for managing serialized data within Claris/FileMaker. If you aim to streamline your solution and reduce the total number of scripts, incorporating the utility script from the provided technique file will undoubtedly save you a significant amount of time.

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.

Claris/FileMaker, as a development environment, is full of all kinds of hidden corners and secret places. Most of this is due to its age and keeping a strong commitment to backwards compatibility. To its credit, there are very few features which have been removed to date. Still have a database which uses repeating fields to store data? They're still there!

To say that developing within the environment is straight forward is a bit misleading. Sometimes, you can combine knowledge about older features with newer ones and end up with something entirely new and cool. That's what happens in this video and technique file. By using JSON with one of those somewhat hidden features, we can solve an age old problem of having field specific information available to the whole solution - and we only need to manage it within one location, which happens to be specific to the field itself. It's one situation where having tightly coupled data is exactly what you're looking for!

In this video we'll take a look at how a well structured format like JSON can benefit us in a wide variety of ways. By addressing the need for supporting multi-lingual field labels, we are just touching the tip of the iceberg with this creative solution.