ISO FileMaker Magazine

This first video discusses the general FileMaker environment and highlights various folders and files any FileMaker developer should be aware of.

ABOUT THE SERIES

The Ultimate FileMaker Course is a walk-through of adding essential components found in pretty much any modern FileMaker solution. The course is based around building a useful tool for launching other FileMaker solutions.

By creating a launcher file, which provides full control over launching your other FileMaker solutions, you'll be treated to a variety of lessons around the various aspects of a successful FileMaker solution.

As any FileMaker solution grows, it's inevitable that errors will creep in as methods and scripts are updated with newer features. And with every new script you add, you're also introducing new opportunities for errors.

For the longest time, we've relied on the Pause on Error checkbox to invoke the debugger when an error occurs. While useful, the constant pop-up of the debugger can quickly interrupt your development "flow" — and honestly, it gets a bit annoying.

Starting with FileMaker 18, we gained a new script step called Set Error Logging. When used effectively within your script call stack, this step can be a powerful tool. By integrating it properly, you can capture and pass along exactly the information you want when errors occur. Even better, if you're logging to a terminal window, you can add color to make the output easier to scan.

This video will walk you through one of the best methods for catching and analyzing errors while scripting your FileMaker solution.

Aside from the welcome user interface refresh in FileMaker 2025, a valuable enhancement has been made to the existing grouping feature. This update encourages greater use of grouped layout objects and helps reduce the number of layout-based calculations, a point of frustration with the previous limitation.

Prior to FileMaker 22, if you applied either a button action (now discouraged) or a hide calculation, you had to ungroup the object before adding anything new to the group. This often caused problems: if you forgot to copy the calculation before ungrouping, you risked losing it and then had to reapply it after regrouping.

With the new enhancement, you can now add or remove elements from a group in multiple ways with no ungrouping required. This short video will walk you through the feature in detail.

One of the greatest advantages of FileMaker's built-in charting tool is its immediate access to aggregated data. This is especially useful when you don't need highly customized charts. If you do require full visual control, using a Web Viewer with JavaScript typically offers much greater flexibility. The downside to that approach, however, is the development time required to extract the data from FileMaker and format it for use in JavaScript. Fortunately, with the help of AI, that process has been significantly streamlined. Still, if you’d prefer to avoid the longer JavaScript route, FileMaker’s native charts have a lot to offer.

While not particularly difficult to use, native charts come with some surprisingly powerful advantages. I recently had a project that called for a quick solution, and I was able to leverage a little-known trick that made native charts an exceptionally efficient choice.

If you need to visualize your data using any of FileMaker’s standard chart types, this short video might provide some new insights into just how useful native charts can be!