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Automated User Interface Creation

Recent videos

Personally, I’m all about the time-savings. I think most people are. If I can accomplish anything, without sacrificing quality, in a shorter period of time I’ll take it!

Well, this video is going to be worth its weight in gold if you’ve spent any amount of time within FileMaker’s Layout mode doing a ton of repetitious tasks working with layout objects. You see, FileMaker is a very powerful tool, but, it does have its own shortcomings. It suffers from a serious degree of “dialogitis”. You often have to drill down through so many dialogs it can take hours to implement an interface which uses a lot of similar elements which only change by a tiny degree - typically by a simple incrementation. This is where you stop and say “Isn’t there a better way to do this?” Why YES! There is. Using a very simple tool, built in FileMaker, and a freely available plug-in, we can save many hundreds (maybe even thousands) of hours of development time over the course of a FileMaker career. This video will show you how!

When was the last time you used FileMaker's Extended Privileges? Never? Well, how about taking advantage of them in such a way that you gain a double level of control over individual user-based privileges. Using one single privilege set, it's possible to control which specific users can view, edit or delete records from your database. You can also turn off, or on, a specific privilege such as editing an invoice for a whole group of users or one specific user.

It's already hard enough to figure out how to make access privileges specific to users. Implementing this easily within FileMaker's own convoluted security is our ultimate goal. If setting up security is the last step you take, then watching this video will hopefully reveal how easy it is to set things up at the beginning, or at any time in your solution's evolution. Since FileMaker Pro provides the Extended Privileges section, there's no reason not to take advantage of it. Let me show you how!

What FileMaker developer wants their solution to be so difficult to use that it causes users not to want to use it? My guess, not a one. So, the first general order of business, beyond your schema, may be adding many of those familiar features which users have already come to expect from any nice software package. When it comes to features, some type of easy-to-use search feature is most likely at the top of the list. The trick is making it work and feel like all the other search features users have become used to. This video showcases the implementation of a powerful OnObjectKeystroke script which enhances the familiar search field functionality.

When first learning structure and schema within any development environment, including FileMaker, the question of “Am I doing this the right way?” always seems rear its ugly head. The answer to that question, however, is not “Yes” or “No” but the more frustrating “It depends”. The reason for this ambiguous response is that the needs of the solution often dictate how it should be structured. If structuring data is something you’ve always had an issue with then this video may have the insight to help move you along.

FileMaker Server attempts to provide the holy grail of software development. That is, code once and run universally. For the most part, it accomplishes this pretty well. At least when it comes to looks. The trick is currently designing something which will work on all three platforms and with a minimal amount of fuss. Sure, you can create a desktop interface, a FileMaker Go mobile interface and a web facing interface, but why? That's three times the work and who likes extra work? It's certainly possible to create a universal layout which will look just fine on all three platforms. This is the video which will provide the insight in accomplishing that very task!

This video is about how simple it can be to structure and interact with data in a very efficient method. It focuses on how data can be categorized and simply identified within the table where it’s stored. Determining how to classify the data is simply a matter of recognizing its obvious pattern in relation to all other data being collected. Because humans create so many patterns, these patterns can be used to make things easier when collecting data.

Every profession has tips, tricks and tools for getting things done. The same holds true for FileMaker Pro. Over my many years of development, I’ve created a variety of tools and methods for making things easier on myself. One of those methods is to use FileMaker itself to manage navigation within my FileMaker solutions. This video is about a tool which I use that handles the display and opening of layouts within a FileMaker solution. In fact, it can quite easily handle the navigation of many solutions because it itself is a solution for solutions. If you deal with one single solution or many different solutions, then I can’t think of a better way to manage this situation other than within FileMaker itself!

It's great to be able to build all kinds of things within FileMaker. It's those few times when you find yourself saying "I wish FileMaker could just do such and such". Of course, once you come to the point where you realize that FileMaker has access to all these other great technologies, you find yourself saying "I wonder how", instead of "I wish". Along the way, someone comes upon some discovery which allows you to do more with FileMaker than was previously known. Sometimes, using a hack that the programmers of FileMaker never even intended, yet there it is, ready for you to use.

In the world of programming, the notion of code which breaks, especially as a solution grows and is used by an every increasing number of people, is known as 'software brittleness'. This is, obviously, something you don't want within your FileMaker solution.

Inside of FileMaker is one of the most powerful engines you could ever hope for. It's not even the native FileMaker calculation engine. It has almost two decades of optimization applied to it, and much of the world's most popular software takes full advantage of it. It's JavaScript - and you have access to it. In this video article and technique file, you'll find some of the most powerful code for accessing things FileMaker can't currently do and this extends well beyond the topic of sorting. When it comes to sorting data, not records, there's no native 'filemaker' way of doing this. The solution is typically either FileMaker's custom functions, some creative trick with sorting records or using a plugin. However, with the use of the readily available JavaScript, you can sort all kinds of things in all kinds of ways. This video will gently introduce you to using one of the tools you should certainly have in your mental toolbox!

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