Author: Vincenzo Menanno

Logging PSoS Activity: Episode III – Return of the JSON

by Vincenzo Menanno
Posted in All, FileMaker, FileMaker Server, JSON, Logging, Performance, Security

In looking back at our initial approach to logging FileMaker PSoS (Perform Script on Server) activity, I reflect back on a number of times where this has been extremely helpful. If you have come to rely on the benefits of PSoS then you also know some of its challenges — one of the biggest is debugging and monitoring how long sessions take.

Since FileMaker 16 introduced JSON, in new systems we’ve switched over to using JSON as the main way of exchanging data for parameters. Because we also use PSoS in new systems, we updated our method for PSoS Logging and this blog entry talks about the changes we made there and also restates the usefulness of this log.
Continue reading “Logging PSoS Activity: Episode III – Return of the JSON” →

FileMaker & Tableau | A Match Made in Data Heaven!

by Vincenzo Menanno
Posted in All, Beezwax News, Data Analytics, FileMaker, FileMaker 16, FileMaker 17, Integration, Tableau FM

Last year when I wrote this blog post we were talking about FileMaker 16 and the Data API being in beta. Now that FileMaker 17 has officially been released and along with it the Data API is out of beta and is a version 1.0.

Continue reading “FileMaker & Tableau | A Match Made in Data Heaven!” →

FileMaker & Tableau | Building Dashboards with Interactivity

by Vincenzo Menanno
Posted in All, Beezwax News, Community, Data Analytics, FileMaker, FileMaker 15, InspectorPro, Tableau, Tableau FM

If you’ve been working with FileMaker, then I don’t have to sell you on the fact that it’s a great solution to help you manage your data. Whether you’re an in-house developer, a consultant, or just starting to explore what is possible with this powerful platform, you will at some point come across the need to build in some kind of dashboard. Maybe your group needs to see sales trends for the last year or perhaps you have a system that tracks projects and want to see the daily average of tasks completed. In either case, dashboards are a great way to synthesize large amounts of information and provide you with insight in a simple and informative visual design.

Continue reading “FileMaker & Tableau | Building Dashboards with Interactivity” →

InspectorPro 6

by Vincenzo Menanno
Posted in All, FileMaker, FileMaker 15, InspectorPro, News, Performance, Techniques, Tools & Add-ons

InspectorPro 6

Highlighting insight, performance and collaboration

Wow! InspectorPro 6 is finally here. Can’t even believe it. It was such a massive undertaking. Lots of great new things and many improvements. Really proud of this release. In the immortal words of the late Steve Jobs… “This is our best version ever”.

Continue reading “InspectorPro 6” →

Export Just What You Need in FileMaker

by Vincenzo Menanno
Posted in All, FileMaker, FileMaker 15, Reporting, Techniques

The Lesson of Context

One of the first lessons I learned with FileMaker is that of context! Layouts, reports, calculations, scripts, and so on all act from the perspective of a single Table Occurrence (TO) — the “context” — pulling in data from related tables as needed.

Generally, the record set being acted on is the set of records in that context table occurrence or a found subset thereof. There are a few exceptions to this, however, and today we’re going to explore one of those.

Continue reading “Export Just What You Need in FileMaker” →

Recycle Your Data | Save Space and Money

by Vincenzo Menanno
Posted in All, FileMaker, Performance, Techniques

A few years ago, I worked on a FileMaker project where the client told us that every week they need to import about 7,000 rows of data that represent some information that this company uses. And every week there might be some modified records, some records that don’t show up any longer, and some new records that hadn’t already existed. For this example, let’s just call it this data “Products”.

Continue reading “Recycle Your Data | Save Space and Money” →

FileMaker Log Files: Episode VII – PSoS Awakens

by Vincenzo Menanno
Posted in All, FileMaker, FileMaker Server, Performance, Techniques

Now more than ever we’re relying on Perform Script on Server (PSoS) to maximize FileMaker performance, so naturally a need arose for a way to proactively monitor how many concurrent scripts are being triggered. This type of logging helps us see if we’re reaching our maximum limit, or have a rogue script eating up processing power.

Continue reading “FileMaker Log Files: Episode VII – PSoS Awakens” →

InspectorPro 5.5 Feature List!

by Vincenzo Menanno
Posted in All, Data Analytics, Design, FileMaker, FileMaker 14, InspectorPro, News

InspectorPro 5.5 is here! With it come some great enhancements and complete support for FileMaker 14:

• Now supports new features, themes, and styles found in FileMaker 14
• New visualization gives you a quick view of referenced and unreferenced items and problems
• New streamlined database view to help you get a bird’s-eye view of your database
• Automatic detection of malformed XML or invalid characters

A brand new Workspace!

by Vincenzo Menanno
Posted in All, FileMaker, FileMaker 14, News, Techniques

As a FileMaker developer you probably spend a big chunk of your time writing scripts. The new Script Workspace in FileMaker 14 is going to help you in a big way. It’s a breath of fresh air and at first glance it might seem trivial in that we now have colors and we actually can have white space, but there are many other productivity improvements that lurk beneath the surface.

Continue reading “A brand new Workspace!” →

Using InspectorPro 5 with FileMaker Pro Advanced 14

by Vincenzo Menanno
Posted in All, FileMaker, FileMaker 14, InspectorPro, News, Tools & Add-ons

FileMaker 14 is here, and while the Database Design Report (DDR) hasn’t changed, here’s a “Getting Started’ walkthrough for using InspectorPro with the latest version of FileMaker Pro Advanced.

Continue reading “Using InspectorPro 5 with FileMaker Pro Advanced 14” →

The Force “FIELD”

by Vincenzo Menanno
Posted in All, FileMaker, Techniques

For the longest time I thought field labels were something special and there was some sort of connection between the label and the field. So if you have ever created a new field and put that field on the layout with the label to the left of it. Then 10 seconds later you change your mind and decide to rename the field. Presto your label has also been renamed.

Continue reading “The Force “FIELD”” →

InspectorPro – Helping you find problems

by Vincenzo Menanno
Posted in All, FileMaker, InspectorPro

When you delete a field that calculations or scripts depend on, FileMaker provides great warnings.

Continue reading “InspectorPro – Helping you find problems” →

SystemVersion – When numbers are not what they seem!

by Vincenzo Menanno
Posted in All, FileMaker

I recently moved to OS X Yosemite, and once again repeated the annual cycle of wondering whether or not my existing solutions will be compatible with the new version. I’ve loved using AppleScript to trigger OS X Notifications from FileMaker since they were introduced in OS X Mavericks, but they stopped working as soon as I installed Yosemite.

Continue reading “SystemVersion – When numbers are not what they seem!” →

NoSSR ( Not Only Sub-Summary Reports )

by Vincenzo Menanno
Posted in All, FileMaker, Techniques

To describe this next technique I came up with my own acronym, and I call it "NoSSR", which stands for Not Only Sub-Summary Reports. The goal of this blog post is to show you a way to build and deliver similar results but in a statically defined way. Another way to put it is to architect for performance, so let’s see what can be possible. This post also assumes you know how to build a FileMaker sub-summary report layout already.
Continue reading “NoSSR ( Not Only Sub-Summary Reports )” →

Button Image Masks

by Vincenzo Menanno
Posted in All, Design, FileMaker, Techniques

Introduction

When you’ve been using FileMaker as long as I have, you know we’ve done all kinds of crazy things to get image masks to work on our buttons. For example, we would use a set of grouped native FileMaker line objects to cover an image just to get an ugly looking mask. I hope that not many developers suffered for too long using that technique.

Download Using Icons

Continue reading “Button Image Masks” →

What Are Your Imports Waiting For? FileMaker Perform Script on Server – Episode II

by Vincenzo Menanno
Posted in All, FileMaker, FileMaker Server, Performance, Techniques

Introduction

I hope that since our previous blog post you have been exploring the possibilities created by FileMaker’s Perform Script on Server (PSoS). This article is a continuation of the PSoS discussion and includes more cool things you can do with it, specifically running database imports on FileMaker Server.

Continue reading “What Are Your Imports Waiting For? FileMaker Perform Script on Server – Episode II” →

100x Faster – Flight Testing FileMaker Perform Script on Server – Episode I

by Vincenzo Menanno
Posted in All, FileMaker, FileMaker Server, Performance, Techniques

Read the follow up to this blog post at What Are Your Imports Waiting For? FileMaker Perform Script on Server – Part II

Introduction

Since the release of FileMaker 13 we have been exploring a new feature called “Perform Script on Server” (PSoS) and trust me there are many cool things you can do with it. I’m going to describe how PSoS works, how it’s best implemented, and how our tests show PSoS can drastically improve database performance, more than 100x in some situations. However, there are also a number of considerations before you run wild and convert scripts to execute via PSoS. So, I’ll cover these as well.

Continue reading “100x Faster – Flight Testing FileMaker Perform Script on Server – Episode I” →

Cancel a FileMaker Script – with Easy Clean-up

by Vincenzo Menanno
Posted in All, FileMaker, Techniques

demo file:  Cancel_Clean_Up.fmp12

As FileMaker developers, sometimes we write scripts that take a long time to process data. Maybe it’s because we’re looping over many records gathering up a report. Or maybe we have set up a process — say for generating a new project, invoice or service order — that involves gathering up a list of tasks, and it takes time to do this.

Continue reading “Cancel a FileMaker Script – with Easy Clean-up” →

Re-Thinking is the new Rebuilding

by Vincenzo Menanno
Posted in All, FileMaker, InspectorPro, Techniques, Tools & Add-ons

Sometimes you just need to start over and to take a fresh look at how you are doing things. Many of you know that I usually like to start things anew, but its also understandable that this is impractical at times.

With the release of FileMaker 12, I was inspired to dive deep into how InspectorPro 4 (IP4) was architected and change my way of thinking. It isn’t about REBUILDING per se, but rather this is about RE-THINKING your solutions as you move to FM 12.
Continue reading “Re-Thinking is the new Rebuilding” →

1 2