ISO FileMaker Magazine

Ah 'Retina'! It just sounds so high resolution - doesn't it? But wait, what does it really mean? How do you translate the whole notion of Retina display to the designs you create for FileMaker Go?

I'll tell you how in this video. It showcases most all the information you need to know in order to make sure your designs in FileMaker Pro/Advanced will 'scale up' to look just as sharp on the high resolution retina display of the new iPad and iPhone.

Come to find out, there's a lot you can now do natively in FileMaker 12 which will mimic the way vectors scale. You've always been safe with native FileMaker elements, and the remaining part of what you need to know is what you can and can't replicate.

With those elements which aren't in FileMaker, you need to know the tricks to make things look as good as they can. It's actually not that much of a secret - just make sure your graphics are double the size! Or watch this video to get the whole Retina picture.

When FileMaker 12 was released, with new gradient support, I was very excited. Also, with the advent of being able to use conditional formatting to make things invisible, things became even more exciting.

When you now combine one field, one script and some conditional formatting, you can accomplish some SUPER simple, (and I mean SIMPLE) progress bars anywhere you need them within your interface.

This video provides you with the insight and knowledge to take advantage of these new FileMaker 12 features in order to create some very useful progress bars. Small, big, fat, thin, long or short. It's now WAY too easy to integrate progress bars into your FileMaker solution. Watch this video for everything you need to know!

As any FileMaker solution grows, you'll inevitably end up adding more and more settings. In some situations, these settings are simple toggle checkboxes which control how things function in the user interface. Either from a user or admin perspective, it really doesn't matter.

What does matter is having to manage all of the aspects of each of these settings. Granted, the easiest thing to do is simply add a new field and making it a checkbox - but, what to do when you know you're adding an extra field simply to control how something works within the user interface - while the solution is running. Does this UI field commingle with your schema? Do you separate it out into a user interface file and data file?

Of course, the answer to those questions depend on your solution and the implementation. In this video, I present a topic related to single value checkboxes and toggling those values. I've been using it as a solution to adding yet more scripts to my solutions. It's very easy to copy and paste the whole layout object and very quickly have a new control setting.

Doing your best to create a robust FileMaker solution is likely part of your goals and objectives. However, until you know how to approach some aspects of your solution design, you can easily spend a lot of time creating something which can be both hard to maintain and upgrade.

This is where canonical coding comes into action. The objective with canonical coding is to put a number of things specific to your whole solution in singular locations. This is also covered by the premise of DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) coding.

In this video, I showcase my new technique file which I'll be using for my FileMaker 12 examples. Much of what is covered can also be accomplished in older versions of FileMaker as well. The video shows you how to implement a localization model which takes advantage of "Settings" layouts.

If you've not used "Settings" layouts then you're likely putting a lot of text into a lot of places where changing that text at a later date will cost you a lot of time and effort. Watch this video if you're interested in making the most robust possible solution you can with FileMaker Pro!

Wow! The FileMaker 12 release has either been a "love it" or "hate it" experience for a number of developers. Regardless of where you stand, the new file format and the layout changes are here to stay. It's the future of FileMaker and how things will be rendered.

Speaking of how things are rendered, there was a very enlightening session at the 2012 Annual Devcon in Miami, FL. FileMaker Inc, in particular Andrew Paulsen, presented a topic named Under the Hood: FileMaker Pro 12 Layouts & Themes. In this session it was covered that FileMaker Layouts act and behave very much like web pages do - hmmnnnnnnn...

Sure, many developers want to be protected from having to know yet another language (such as CSS), but those developers will quickly be left behind - as their solutions won't be optimized.

In this video I extend what was discussed, and cover how layouts can be optimized for the best network performance possible. If you want your FileMaker 12 solution to have the best possible chance of being both fast and flexible then you need to know what is going on!

Within FileMaker, the methods for presenting related information extend to calculated fields, web viewers and portals. The most obvious of these is portals.

Portals allow you integrate icons, graphics, buttons, fields (of course) and work in all kinds of user interface tricks. One of those tricks, from earlier versions, was creating a fixed sized portal and then paging through related data a group at a time.

Show ten rows and you can page through easily because you know how many rows there are. What happens, however, when you have a variable number of rows? You need another mechanism in order to determine the row count and be able to page through the data.

So what if we add the fact that FileMaker 12 actually allows you to turn off the scrollbars on a still scrollable portal? Wouldn't that be cool?

Well, give this video a view and you'll quickly find out you can do more than a few cool tricks with this new knowledge!

Your FileMaker Go app is ready. You're excited that FileMaker Go 12 is free. You point your customers or users to go download FileMaker Go from the iTunes App store. Now you simply need to make the process of getting into that one specific database just a little bit easier. How about a Home Screen launch icon? Darn, FileMaker Go can't do that... but wait.

While it would be great if applications could generate their own launching icons, I personally couldn't find any app which would create icons for you. I do use an app which allows you to specify custom urls named Launch Center and I'm also familiar with using a url redirect. So, I married the two ideas together.

Knowing that Mobile Safari allows you to create Home Screen icons there were only a few little hurdles to make this all happen.

This video provides the information and insight you need in order to make Home Screen launch icons for specific FileMaker Go databases. With the concept of syncing, and using a local database on a mobile platform are taking off, it only makes sense that you'd like to customize this experience as much as possible. Watching this video will give you the know-how and tools to make it happen!

There's so much data moving around daily on our networks (including the Internet at large) that it would hurt your brain to even think of how many bits and bytes move over the air and wires.

The methods by which all this data is pushed and pulled around is all a matter of protocols, ports, packets and more. For us mere database developers, we need to know the various methods for pushing and pulling some of this data into our solutions.

This is where XML/XSL (and XPath) come into play. While importing and exporting into known structures, such as csv or tab delimited, is just fine when you have 100% control of both the sending and receiving end, things can get a bit more complicated when you have to start doing a lot of data massaging and you don't control the whole process. Cleaning up messy data can be far less worth your time, in the long run, as opposed to picking up a new skill or learning a new format.

While XML isn't anything new, it may be new to you and knowing how to use it, along with XSL and XPATH is one of those things which almost every developer may come across at least one - if not a few (or many) times in the life of all the solutions they may touch.

So, the trick is to pick something both fun, realistic and useful in order to learn how to import XML data into a FileMaker solution. Watching this video will provide you with a level of confidence to continue your education and push forward with using this ubiquitous encoding of data. If you have an option of doing bulk imports via tab delimited, csv or xml my hope is that you choose XML if you don't control the whole process. This video will show you why!

It's finally here, and it's a power tool you simply can't ignore. Yes, you can still build a FileMaker solution the same way you always have. With lots and lots of table occurrences to make FileMaker do exactly what you want it to do.

The problem, however, has always been information overload. As once the solution gets to a certain point, it becomes increasingly harder to decipher. This is due to the fact that FileMaker has always been a tightly bound environment between the data and the presentation of that data (the UI).

The new ExecuteSQL function presents a wide number of opportunities to SERIOUSLY (note the all caps!) reduce the complexity of both your relationship graph and the content of scripts.

The best way to visualize this is thinking of an apple tree. You can always start grabbing apples from the bottom. As you need apples from the top, you've got to come up with something to get you higher. Maybe you climb the tree. Maybe you see a board lying around and can lean it against the tree. Maybe there's enough boards to build a ladder. This is like adding table occurrences to achieve the end result.

Then again, wouldn't it be nice if you simply already had a ladder? This is the situation with ExecuteSQL. FileMaker now provides a tool which allows you to pull out any data (i.e. grab any apples) you wish at any time. While this has been possible for many years with plugins, some developers just never felt the need to venture into the land of SQL. Things can break and you have to learn a new syntax.

With excuses about SQL now gone, because it's baked in, - at least for the SELECT statement - you simply must start taking advantage of it.

This video is a great example of just how much this new function can reduce the complexity of your relationship graph - and it's only one example of many. Need to get your head around this new functionality? Take a ride on the SQL train!

For some developers, the Let function can be a confusing tool. However, without it, FileMaker calculations would be the eternal mess they used to once be.

The Let function is pretty much a critical tool (in my opinion) that all FileMaker developers should know and use. If only for the reason that it provides the ability to self-document code by using human readable variables.

This video provides a great walk through of how to get started with the Let function and more importantly, explains why you should be using it if you're not!