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The collective talent pool here at Excelisys have spent years working with Filemaker Pro, MySQL and various other technologies. Having learned our fair share of tricks of the trade, we sometimes enjoy giving back to the developer & private community at large by sharing some of these quaint little tidbit collections of 1’s and 0’s. So here’s an assortment of various stuff that you can put to use right now as is, or tweak and use in your own solutions. Many of these demos contain embedded PDF white papers explaining their specific technique and useage. Have fun! And let us know if there’s a particular tip you’d like to see posted here! Enjoy!
PLEASE NOTE – THESE ARE “AS–IS” – PLEASE USE AT OWN RISK, WE DO NOT PROVIDE ANY WARRANTIES OR SUPPORT!
One of the coolest features in FileMaker™ is conditional formatting. With it you can draw attention to fields that need entry, add color coding to areas of your screen that will change according to what type of record you have and much, much more. In fact, the only real limit is your imagination... so let's explore!
Adding records to a portal is easy but are you doing it the right way or the wrong way. In this article we describe three methods, and which one you should never use even though FileMaker lets you. If you have found yourself or your users spending their entire day trying to delete portal rows that aren't even there, then read this and be amazed!
Perhaps one of the most significant advances in FileMaker™ was the introduction of native tab panels. There are many different ways to use tab panels... good, bad and cool - so let's EXplore some of these tab techniques and uses as I share some tricks I learned along the way!
We are reasonably certain that sometime in the future, FileMaker will add a script step called “Sort Portal Rows.” Until then, building a user–controlled variable portal sorting interface involves a couple of fields, a calc or two, and a script. This demo and white paper will show you how.
“I need a reminder to pop–up every month to close out the books.” “I want our readers to have the option of auto–renewing their subscriptions.” There are lots of reasons to use them. This file, along with the accompanying documentation, demonstrates the steps needed to implement true recurring events in FileMaker Pro.
This demo and white paper outlines how to create hierarchically organized portals in FileMaker Pro, similar to the Macintosh Finder’s list view or Window’s Explorer view. It utilizes FileMaker 7 features to enhance the interface, but this method can be used with versions as early as FileMaker 4.
This is yet another sorting technique based on its predecessor yet simpler, that allows for dynamic multicolumn sorting. The user can click a button to sort a column, shift-click to add additional columns, click or shift-click sorted columns to reverse the sort order, AND option-click sorted columns to remove them. The scripting is even designed to allow the user to un-sort the list. It can handle sorting all ?eld types and it can sort by value lists. With only one minor difference the technique can be used to sort both list view layouts and portals. And each list can have it�s own unique sort order. How's that for some fancy schmancy FileMaker trickery!
Portals have been around, in FileMaker™, for as long as I can remember and they are an ubiquitous part of the program. Portals have both positive and negative points to ponder, which can be maddening! This article explores what they are, when to use them, and the pros and cons associated with them to try and keep your database solution from the Edge of Forever failure.
With this amazing demonstration file and accompanying white paper, you’ll learn a technique on how to provide familiar and elegant drag–and–drop functionality to your FileMaker Pro solutions! (Requires FileMaker Pro 10)
One of the staples of many FileMaker solutions is the calendar navigator. It provides a quick, easy and intuitive way to specify dates and date ranges. In previous versions of FileMaker, one had to either create a large number of calculation fields or (more elegantly) use pre–created graphic calendars and link to them with a concatenated key. Since FileMaker 7, all that has changed. Check out this demo and white paper, and find out how!
An oft–requested feature for FileMaker Pro solutions is an audit log – the ability to track relevant changes to a record. This tip, accompanied by a white paper PDF, outlines how to do just that. This method will automatically track each change to the fields the developer specifies, including who made the change, when, what the old value was, and what the new one is.
The ability to create Custom Functions in FileMaker Advanced introduces the possibility of looping calculations, otherwise known as “recursion.” In this demo you’ll see several good examples of recursive calculations in action. A complete white paper covering this topic, which de–constructs the example calculations, is included as a PDF within the file authored by our own Andrew Persons.
