ISO FileMaker Magazine

When a programming environment doesn’t offer you every widget you might expect to have, then some enterprising individual will typically create the solution you seek - somewhere.

If that person shares the solution with everyone else, and you can find it, then it obviously makes your life easier. You just have to find the technique and take the time to implement and understand it. Anyone can simply copy and paste the pieces to a puzzle, but understanding how it works it what makes it possible to adapt, modify and abstract from what you learn about the solution.

In this video, I showcase a technique file from a fellow FileMaker developer named Charles Delfs. He implemented a number of creative twists on a popular technique of being able to offer users with the ability to sort portal rows by simply dragging them in between each other.

If offering this feature to your users creates any degree of value, then make sure and let Charles know about your overwhelming joy at him having taken the time to refine and update this popular technique.

As a developer, it’s often hard to get out of a mindset where your response of “It’s simple silly, you just search for a portion of the word, not the whole word.” to the question of a particular search not providing a user’s expected results.

This type of response may come from a user when they mention they know the user “Petrowsky” is in the database but it doesn’t come across verbally that they’re really searching for “Petrowski” - which obviously doesn’t match the version ending in a “y” instead of an “i”.

This level of understanding, that you can simply enter “petrow” in order to search for both variations, isn’t inherently obvious to all users. So the next best solution is to provide some type of filtering process. Something where the user can narrow down their list of choices to find out where the disconnect is happening.

In this video, we look at a sublimely simple script which makes this type of task an utter piece-of-cake. If you’ve got users who need to make routine selections on filtered subsets of data then the knowledge contained within this video will pay dividends beyond just knowing how to filter based on an alphabet letter!

As a software/database developer, one of your primary goals is making your solutions easy to use. This means users should be able to perform common queries by simply clicking buttons which run the queries automatically.

This is probably something you already do. But, the big question is this, “Do you make it easy on yourself for creating those simple queries?” Many developers will create a unique script for each of the various queries, and in some cases this is just fine. It’s when you start feeling the overwhelm of a growing list of scripts when you start to ask the really important questions.

Is it really possible to compose most of your scripted Finds using one single script? You’d better believe it is! In fact, if you abstract the searching part of your solution, it becomes very easy to create all kinds of queries, on demand, right there within the user interface.

When you abstract your search queries, you reduce the number of scripts within your solution and make it both quick and easy to automate the searching functionality of your solution.

What would a database solution be without the ability to send email? Well, it would be a database solution without the ability to send email - but who wants that right?

Email is obviously an integral part of our modern day communication. And, despite what the Twitters, Facebooks and Instagrams of the world would have you believe, email is here to stay.

The easiest way to add email support to a FileMaker database is to simply use the Send Mail script step. But, that’s boring, and sometimes it doesn’t work. Especially when you’re using an email client not supported by FileMaker. The Send Mail step alone also has limited use when, most of the time, the intended objective is to integrate data from the database.

Therefore, we need to integrate the data from our fields. The easiest way to do this is to use FileMaker’s <<mergeFields>> right within the content of a text block somewhere on the layout, or off to the side of the layout, and then using the function GetLayoutObjectAttribute ( “My_Merge_Email” ; "content" ).

The problem we hit is that this is not user friendly. You don’t often give users the ability to edit layouts. So why not emulate the way FileMaker works with merge fields and simply do the same thing using data which is stored within fields?

This video showcases one of the most streamlined and easy-to-implement solutions for handling merge values into content stored within a field. Using the content provided here you’ll have an email merging and sending solution within mere minutes every time you need it!