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Our Library of Videos
While Claris/FileMaker offers a convenient Duplicate Record menu option, of which there's always a companion script step for most menus, there's more to the equation than simply duplicating your primary record. In fact, in most situations, it is necessary to duplicate both parent and related child records. You will likely need to duplicate a complete set of records to address the entire entity. For example, think of the relationship between Order, Line Items, Ship Address, and so on, in order for a customer to place a duplicate order.
To accomplish this, there are various native methods available, often involving multiple GTRR (Go to Related Record) steps. Additionally, within your script, you will need to carry a newly created primary key to all the newly created child records. Therefore, the question arises: "What happens when you need to duplicate a large number of record sets?" This was the question posed by Daniel Wood, who proceeded to test and document the methods and their benchmarked results in an article published on their blog at the FileMaker consultancy Digital Fusion.
When confronting this same question, there is a method that I personally favor and know to be quite fast, and I was eager to see how it would perform. I integrated this method into Daniel's file and discovered that by utilizing a plug-in, a significant speedup can be achieved. This article focuses on the fundamentals of how this technique works and provides guidance on its implementation in your own solutions. I'd like to express my gratitude to Daniel for his hard work and for granting permission to distribute a modified version of his file.
When you're dealing with any type of web service which doesn't offer an API for data exchange, you'll inevitably end up working with a web form for getting data into that service. Data has to get in via some method and the most common is your standard web form.
Maybe you need to interact with a Google Form or some other public form service. While some of these services will provide a standard format such as CSV for pulling data out, there are still those services where you need to popuate a web form using your own data.
So, when it comes to moving data in and out of FileMaker, via a web form, you need to use the tools available. The great thing about this situation is that JavaScript is the tool and you have it right there ready for you to use. The humble Web Viewer is your gateway to getting your FileMaker data into a form. This video walks through the JavaScript and setup you need to know in order to interact with pretty much any web form on the web. Learning these valuable tools
When starting out with FileMaker, there's rarely the situation where you receive any "before you get started" advice. This is because working in FileMaker is like picking up a blank canvas and having someone say "Go for it! Paint something."
Essentially, you need to know what the tools are, how you use them, what can be accomplished and how certain decisions might affect you. So, when it comes to field indexing, you might not know the default settings could potentially cause your solution to become bigger than it should - without any benefit to performance.
While searching an indexed field vs. an unindexed one becomes somewhat obvious - the search may be slower than expected - it's the fact that every field, by default, can optionally enable its index that makes things interesting with regards to file size and, to a certain degree, some efficiency.
In this video I break down exactly how you can see what is going on with each specific field index and what the true difference is between a value index and a word index. You may even find out that your primary key fields are actually able to index more than they really should!
Claris International, Inc. released Claris FileMaker 2023 (version 20) of the FileMaker platform on Tue. April 25th 2023. This release, like all previous dot releases, saw just a few major features and some new branding via a new icon.
In my opinion, there are primarily three major features in FMP 20 and a VERY large number of both fixes and minor features. I'm calling this one the "move towards enterprise" release. It improves upon its level of support for robust technologies such as ARM support, furthered Linux support and integrates features which will help any organization with more easily tracking critical data.
I've created a somewhat lengthy video which provides insight to the major new 20 features and also recaps the other features which have been released over the previous 3 years.
Give yourself 30-60 minutes to catch up with what's been released in the FileMaker platform over the previous years up until today's release.
With many native features in Claris/FileMaker, you may end up hitting what you "think" is a brick wall. In this case, I'm referring to the ability of sorting portals. You've only got one checkbox per portal with the options for specifying a selection of fields to sort by. True, you can choose a number of fields to sort by, but, you can't change their order dynamically or allow a user to make any changes to which fields are used.
That is, of course, unless you combine a variety of native features which will allow you to accomplish your desired results for sorting portals. In this video, we take a look at a wonderfully great technique for being able to sort any given portal on any number of fields in either direction and being the masters of our own portal sorting destiny. Need to allow end users to sort portals for maximum effect? Go no further than watching this video and using the provided technique file.
While you won't have access to as many visual effects as if you had created a native iOS application, there are still some things you can do and take advantage of with native transitions within FileMaker Go. One of my own recent experiences led to making a dedicated script which enhances the visual appeal of performing a find within a single layout.
In order to gain the advantage of FileMaker Go's native layout transitions, you can use a dedicated layout and script to accomplish some really nice transition effects. It's also a good idea to be familiar with how you can use the Set Layout Object Animation script step in conjunction with Popovers and Sliders.
This video will show you a few solutions to making your FileMaker Go/iOS SDK solution a bit more visually appealing by taking advantage of the native transitions provided by the environment.
Sometimes, it's the little things you learn that make working with Claris/FileMaker so enjoyable. Things like making a Button Bar balanced when hiding segments and not having to use any scripts or extra code (unless desired) to do it.
This video presents a great little technique of how you can use a Hide calculation on your button bar segments yet still maintain the same relative button size. With this little bit of know-how, you can easily stack various button bars and provide all kinds of progressive disclosure of various solution features.
Add this simple trick to your arsenal of great UI tricks for Claris/FileMaker.
When you first develop your FileMaker solution you're typically dealing with sample and/or test data. Everything works great. It's fast and efficient and you're guessing users will just love using it. Until you hear feedback like "It takes forever to simply see a list of people to pick from."
As you scratch your head wondering why things got slow, it's likely because you didn't think about what's happening on every record of that simple little portal. Your once wonderful complex filter, which was working just fine on the 1,000 records, now chokes to death on the 10,000 records in the real world.
You ask yourself "Is there something I can do to make this faster?" and you find this video about Fast Filtering Portals. Yes, is the answer. You can optimize that portal filter such that the fewest number of CPU cycles are required in order to show a user's desired results. The trick is knowing how to make it happen with the tools we have available within FileMaker. Need to make your portal filters faster? This video will likely have the answer.
Learning everything you can do with Claris/FileMaker scripts is such a wonderful journey. When you first start using the available script triggers, it often becomes a bit of an issue if you aren't fully aware of all the impacts. This video is an update to older videos which didn't have the insights presented in this video.
If you've been using Script Triggers within Claris/FileMaker for some time, then you might want to give this video a watch to see if you're missing any of the latest and greatest know-how dealing with Script Triggers.
Developing software in FileMaker can be such a joy when you're able to solve so many problems so quickly. There is, however, a point where you start to solve so many problems that your solution starts to slow down and you find yourself wondering why.
Most commonly, it's the result of cumulative features compounding to make your solution slower and slower. Without careful consideration of the user interface, and how features are presented, it's easy to create a solution which starts to lag over time.
In this video, I show how portal filters really work and how to address the issue of a portal used for a very simple selection process. In most cases, your portal is only going to show a fraction of the number of fields found in its table. To this end, you must learn how to replicate the native portal filtering feature. Filtering with JavaScript/JSON is one of the most powerful ways to present data in both an efficient and faster way.
Finding your FileMaker solution is feeling slower as time goes by? You need the content covered in this video!