Author: Will Miro

FileMaker Semantic Search – Part 3: Advanced Fun

by Will Miro
Posted in AI, AI with FM, All, Beezwax News, Business, Claris Development, Community, FileMaker, FileMaker 2023, FileMaker 2024, FileMaker Go, FileMaker Server, Integration, News, Techniques

Semantic search is a bit like LiDAR: it penetrates the data’s lexical canopy to reveal underlying meaning. In “Part 1: Fundamental Power” and “Part 2: Key Details” we covered the basics of FileMaker semantic search. Now let’s consider some more exotic ways this new feature can put a spotlight on our data.

We’ll show an example of “unified search” across multiple tables, using natural language to construct a semantic search. Then we’ll extend this to a second example, showing “unified search + actions”. A downloadable demo/tutorial file is provided for each of these two examples.

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FileMaker Semantic Search – Part 2: Key Details

by Will Miro
Posted in AI with FM, All, Beezwax News, Business, Claris Development, Community, FileMaker, FileMaker 2023, FileMaker 2024, FileMaker Go, FileMaker Server, Integration, News, Techniques

In “FileMaker Semantic Search – Part 1: Fundamental Power” we discussed how to configure your Claris FileMaker 2024 app to support semantic search. Here in Part 2 of this three-part blog series we’ll dig deeper into the details of this awesome new functionality, including embeddings and cosine similarity, with a demo tutorial file for exploring AI Call Logging.

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FileMaker Semantic Search – Part 1: Fundamental Power

by Will Miro
Posted in AI, AI with FM, All, Beezwax News, Business, Claris Development, Community, FileMaker, FileMaker 2023, FileMaker 2024, FileMaker Go, FileMaker Server, Integration, News, Techniques

FileMaker 2024 delivers native semantic search, and it’s awesome. Now you can search records whose text is similar to the semantic meaning of your search term, even if those records don’t include your exact search term. Using natural language, users can be freed from trying to recall exactly how data was input. Let’s dive in to see just how powerful FileMaker’s semantic search is.

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Editable Picker List in FileMaker

by Will Miro
Posted in FileMaker, Techniques

Recently I was tasked with implementing a picker list whereby the user could assign people to a project, and indicate each person’s hourly allocation to that project as that assignment was made. How can data be associated with names in a picker list, before those names have actually been stamped onto their own records?

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Multi-Column Portals

by Will Miro
Posted in FileMaker, FileMaker 17, Techniques

A colleague recently posed this challenge: is it possible to show two columns in a portal, such that the first row displays records 1 and 2, the second row displays records 3 and 4, etc.? With FileMaker, the answer is usually “Yes!”

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Master-Detail Layouts in FileMaker

by Will Miro
Posted in FileMaker, FileMaker 17

FileMaker 17’s new master-detail layouts display the list of records in the user’s found set. As the user performs finds, constrains, omits, sorts, or creates or deletes records, the master-detail portal will update to stay in sync. Imagine a portal that a user can sort any way they like, filter any way they like, and click a row to see details for that row, all right out of the box. That’s the power of the master-detail portal.

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FileMaker 14 – Button Bars

by Will Miro
Posted in All, Design, FileMaker, FileMaker 14, Techniques

The new Button Bar layout object provides developers with an improved method to manage a cluster of buttons that have functional and/or cosmetic similarities.

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Popover Pop-up Menus

by Will Miro
Posted in All, Design, FileMaker, Techniques

Overview

This technique uses filterable portals contained in FileMaker 13’s new Popover object to provide user-friendly pop-up menu behavior.
Download

Popover_Popup 1

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Working with Repeating Fields

by Will Miro
Posted in All, FileMaker, Techniques

Demo file:  RepeatingFieldFunctions.fp7

I began using FileMaker at the spry old age of FileMaker Pro 8, so I’ve never been through the trenches of using repeating fields to accomplish what can now be done with portals. However, repeating fields still have a variety of uses, and I’m happy to have them in my toolkit.

When I’m working with a repeating field, there are several questions I might ask of it, depending on the task at hand.

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Good Sir William’s Heirs

by Will Miro
Posted in All, FileMaker, Techniques

Demo file:  Sir_Williams_Heirs_fp7

That old Bard, good Sir William, is nearing the end of his life. Having already provided well for his five children, he now seeks to divide his literary empire among his eleven grandchildren:

FamilyTree 1

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Charting from the Active Field

by Will Miro
Posted in All, Design, FileMaker, Techniques

Neither I nor my client can anticipate every chart that the solution’s users might want to see. A user’s desire to view a high-level visual representation of their data can be spontaneous and idiosyncratic. This technique allows for the user to create an ad hoc chart, albeit within narrow parameters (i.e. the chart is simple, presents only counts of values, and is pre-formatted).

FileMaker File: ChartActiveField.fp7

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ValueCountSpecific ( lst ; value )

by Will Miro
Posted in All, FileMaker 
ValueCount ( FilterValues ( lst ; value ) )

Ben Miller and I came up with this tiny little function to tell us how many times a specific value occurs in a list. It’s smart enough to consider full values (carriage-return delimited), rather than partial text strings.

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