Estimated Time To Read This: 2 – 3 minutes       I’ve spent the last several years working on solutions using a variety of databases – primarily FileMaker, but I’ve also used MySql, SQL Server and even Oracle a time or two. One of the things I like about using SQL databases is that you can join tables together pretty much on the fly. In FileMaker, if I have a calculation that requires a relationship that I haven’t defined, it means that I need to go to the relationship graph, create a ... Read More

Estimated Time To Read This: 2 minutes       Just a quick post as I get back into things after the holidays. While I’ve had a chance to use most browsers (Internet Explorer, Opera, Chrome, Safari, etc) I tend to use FireFox day to day, so it’s no surprise that I do most of my testing and development on it. One of the nice things about modern browsers is that they allow you to use add-ons, and there are a number of them that are useful for web development. Here are a couple that I use. Firebug Firebug is a ... Read More

Estimated Time To Read This: 2 – 3 minutes       More and more recently I’ve found that I’ve had to add Javascript functionality to my PHP based websites; from something simple like hiding/displaying sections of a webpage based on user input to adding in UI features like Datepickers, menus, tabs, etc to using Ajax to modify the contents of a page. While it’s possible to do all of this from scratch, it’s time consuming – and most of it has probably already been done by someone else. ... Read More

Estimated Time To Read This: 2 – 4 minutes       I’ve done a couple of posts now on viewing FileMaker databases over the web via different methods – Instant Web publishing, using Site Assistant to build a PHP based site; using custom web publishing and FileMaker’s API to build a PHP based website from scratch. Each technology has their has their Pros and Cons, but which one is the best one to use? There’s no cut and dried answer to that question; it really depends on a number of things. ... Read More

Estimated Time To Read This: 2 minutes       Following up on Matt’s post on the WordPress mobile app for Android, I decided to look at the WordPress app for iOS. I mostly focused on the iPad version, but I did play with the iPhone version on my iPod touch; there are some differences in the interface but it’s a universal app so the functionality is pretty much the same on both platforms. Set up is pretty simple; once you download the app (which is available free from the app store) you will be prompted to ... Read More

Estimated Time To Read This: 2 – 4 minutes       I wasn’t really sure where to start with this blog post. I’ve been writing articles and blog posts for CoreSolutions for a while, but they’ve mostly been on the FileMaker side of things, which really represents about half my job – for a good chunk of the last decade I’ve been splitting my development time between both FileMaker and PHP. Granted, my PHP development really came out of the need to pull data from a FileMaker database ... Read More

Estimated Time To Read This: 2 minutes       One of my favorite new features introduced back in FileMaker 8 was the inclusion of local and global variables. It cut down on the need to define extra fields for temporarily storing data in scripts (for example, storing the value of a primary key when creating a related record, keeping track of certain values when looping through records, etc). One of the things that I wished you could do, though, was display the contents of these fields on a layout; you still needed to ... Read More

Estimated Time To Read This: 2 minutes       A few months back, I wrote a post about FileMaker’s built in PHP Site Assistant. It’s a handy tool for creating simple sites, but I find it a bit limiting when it comes to creating more complex sites; so I usually tend to write websites in PHP from scratch. It’s actually been possible to do this for a while: around the time FileMaker Pro 5.5 was released, Chris Hansen wrote the first version of FX.php, which was the first solution I found that allowed you ... Read More

Estimated Time To Read This: 2 – 4 minutes       On April 20th, FileMaker released a new update for their FileMaker Go product for iOS. The first update since September, this release adds a number of welcome new features as well as some performance improvements. I won’t go into everything, but I’ll touch on some of the bigger additions below. Charting This is a feature that I was hoping would have been included in earlier releases, but it is finally here. It works exactly the same as it does in the ... Read More

Estimated Time To Read This: 2 minutes       Recently, I was working on a solution where some users only had View access to specific records in one of the tables. I set up a privilege set to do what I wanted, and – once I had worked the kinks out – things were working pretty smoothly; the test account I created could only see data in the records they were supposed to. The only hiccup was that the rest of the records showed up with “<no access>” in the fields – which is kind of ugly, and not ... Read More

Estimated Time To Read This: 2 – 4 minutes       I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few years building websites in PHP using FileMaker as a back end (starting with Chris Hansen’s FX.PHP, then switching over to FileMaker’s own PHP API) but I’d never really used FileMaker’s built-in PHP Site Assistant. Since I am used to coding everything myself  I never really saw the need for it, but I decided to try it out recently just as a test to see how it works. The Site Assistant can be ... Read More

Estimated Time To Read This: 2 minutes       If you’ve ever been to a website like Amazon, you know it’s pretty easy to send your friends or family to the exact item you’re looking at — it’s as simple as copying the URL and sending it to them in an email. In fact, many of these sites have a link on each product that will do this for you automatically. The new Snapshot Link feature in FileMaker Pro 11 does something similar, and it’s easy to use. In the File menu, just go to ... Read More

Estimated Time To Read This: 2 – 3 minutes       I’ve had a chance to use FileMaker Go for a couple of months now, and I’ve been impressed with the amount of functionality they’ve managed to pack into a portable application – it’s a big improvement over the old FileMaker Mobile. Granted, it doesn’t have all the functionality of the desktop client, but  FileMaker does seem to be dedicated to supporting it. The 1.1.1 patch released in September adds several new features, ... Read More

Estimated Time To Read This: 2 minutes       Following up on last week’s CoreFM blog, one of the interesting things about FileMaker® Pro’s Status toolbar is that you can actually override the behavior of some of its buttons by using custom menus. It’s something that takes a bit of work to set up, but once you get the hang of it, it allows for quite a bit of flexibility. Looking at the custom Menu Dialog and editing the new record command, it looks something like this: On the right, there are options to ... Read More

Estimated Time To Read This: 2 minutes       While it might not be seen by a lot of users, the re-designed Inspector is one of the more useful new features for developers in FileMaker Pro 11. While it’s been around in one form or another for a while, up until now it’s been pretty basic, allowing you to adjust the size and position of an object, as well as (in more recent versions) the object name. The new Inspector keeps all of that, but also takes a lot of the functionality that used to be hidden in ... Read More

Estimated Time To Read This: 2 minutes       Using portals in FileMaker Pro is a great way to view a lot of related information on a single screen. For example, if you’re sitting on a contact record, you can have portals that let you view activities, invoices orders, etc. for that contact, all at a glance. If you have a lot of records in your database, you might have to do a lot of scrolling to find, say, an invoice from a few years back. FileMaker 11 has introduced a new feature called “Portal ... Read More

Estimated Time To Read This: 2 minutes       Instant web publishing (IWP) was first introduced to FileMaker Pro in version 4 as a quick way to publish FileMaker data on the web. It’s not a solution you are going to use in every case, however there’s quite a bit you can do with it. While your layouts won’t appear exactly the same way in the browser as they do in FileMaker Pro (you’ll probably have to play around with the layout a little bit to make it look right on the web), virtually ... Read More

Estimated Time To Read This: 3 – 5 minutes       Before FileMaker 10, pretty much the only way to run a script in FileMaker Pro is to click a button (or run it from another script, or from the Scripts menu). There was no way to, for example, run a script when a user makes a change to a field, or to run a script at a certain time, without the use of a plugin. FileMaker 10 introduced the concept of script triggers, which gives developers much more flexibility in using scripts. There are several ways triggers can ... Read More

Estimated Time To Read This: 4 – 7 minutes       In previous versions of FileMaker Pro, when you placed an object on a layout; the object’s size and position was static – even if the user increased/decreased the size of the window, the object would remain exactly the same. FileMaker Pro 9 has introduced the ability to resize objects automatically when the user resizes a window. This allows you to add objects that grow to fill in the available space, or move right or down as the user increases the width or ... Read More

Estimated Time To Read This: 4 – 7 minutes       Up until now, there have been very few options for searching dates and times in FileMaker Pro. The user could search for a specific date or time (e.g. 1/15/2006 or 12:15 PM), or they could search for a range of dates or times (1/1/2006…1/31/2006). However, FileMaker now allows the user to take advantage of several new search options, which makes searching much easier. Before covering the new search options for searching dates and times, we will cover some ... Read More

Estimated Time To Read This: 4 – 6 minutes       FileMaker Inc. recently released version 8.5 of its FileMaker Pro and FileMaker Pro Advanced software. One of the new features, the web viewer control, is essentially a mini web browser that you can drop on any FileMaker layout. There are limitations; for instance, you don’t have the full set of controls that you’d get in a full fledged browser (you have to build forward and back buttons if you want them) but it still allows you to view content from ... Read More

Estimated Time To Read This: 4 – 6 minutes       In previous versions of FileMaker, it was fairly difficult to change the behaviour of the default FileMaker Menus. You could restrict access to some menu functions using passwords, but to make any other changes, you needed to rely on third party solutions. With FileMaker 8, however, we now have the option to create custom menus. Creating Custom Menus In order to create Custom Menus for a solution, you need to use FileMaker 8 Advanced. In the File menu, go ... Read More