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Our Library of Videos
Debugging your solution's features isn't simply about using the built-in debugger offered by FileMaker. Debugging also involves knowing enough about the environment to determine what could be causing a problem. It includes being able to investigate and troubleshoot a particular feature while testing.
It's probably no surprise that using a dedicated developer-only option, such as a debug menu, is one of the best ways to approach the problem.
In this video, we walk through the foundations of the debug menu I personally use in most of my solutions and discuss how it evolves and what elements it provides.
Being able to move within a development environment with ease and efficiency is one of the great joys of integrating features quickly into your solution. The quicker features go in, the better you feel about the progress.
While setting up and taking the time to familiarize yourself with and use shortcut keys may feel like a bit of a hassle, it's well worth the investment for the time it saves.
In this part of an ongoing series, we'll cover a highly effective method for managing your personal keyboard shortcut keys on macOS. We'll do it right within FileMaker itself, and we'll take the opportunity to explore how to manage preferences using the command-line tool defaults.
Once we've got our shortcut keys installed and working, the magic of time savings is what comes next.
This video discusses the general FileMaker preference settings and file specific settings.
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.
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.
Working with simple lists of values is one of the most fundamental aspects of building software. FileMaker, like any other development environment, often requires working with lists of values, whether it's a global field used as a relationship key or multiple selections made from a checkbox widget.
In this video, I'll present a number of custom functions that provide common and practical operations for handling lists of values. These functions can be copied and pasted directly into your FileMaker solution, offering a wide range of benefits.
Functions covered in this video:
- ValueExists
- ValuePosition
- ValuesExtract
- ValuesNotInList
- ValuesWalk
- ValuesWrap
- ValueToggle
We'll walk through each function and discuss how it's most commonly used within a FileMaker solution. Whether you've worked extensively with lists or only sparingly, these functions may change the way you approach handling values in your projects.
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.
One of the fundamental methods for loading a found set of records in FileMaker has traditionally been storing and using the key values of a selected set of records. With the powerful Go To Related Record script step, you can easily load any number of records.
This can be achieved through either a global field relationship or a standard schema relationship. However, with the established method, if you want to store and reload a found set, you need a few additional elements: a Summary field (low overhead) and a dedicated relationship, which is always going to be required.
With the introduction of the new GetRecordIDsFromFoundSet() function in FileMaker 2025 (v22), this process becomes significantly easier.
Whether you’re recreating a simple found set or reconstructing a complex query using record ranges, this new function will help you streamline your solutions and reduce development overhead.
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.
Becoming familiar with all of FileMaker’s possible technology integrations can take many years. Often, the learning process happens as a side effect of solving a specific need. While you can use almost any other programming language alongside FileMaker, the built-in features can be a breath of fresh air, especially if you haven’t tried them before.
In this video, I take a look at the GetLiveText feature, introduced in version 19.5, which is supported on both macOS and iOS. If you’re using FileMaker Go or working with a large number of images, the GetLiveText functions can prove very useful.
Even if your deployment is primarily on Windows, a single Mac can serve as a processing agent to pick up images and perform some free OCR. If extracting text from images is something you need, be sure to check out this handy feature.
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!