We develop FileMaker applications because we want a place to store information for the long term. We track events, tasks, contacts, finances—FileMaker can track almost anything. To update information, the application might ingest a spreadsheet.
Continue reading “Speeding FileMaker Performance with Truncate Table”
When you consider how to keep information safe, you might first imagine a team of hackers in a dank basement typing and clicking their way into your bank account.
Continue reading “Mask Data with Concealed Edit Boxes in FileMaker 15”
In recent years, design, has become such an important aspect of what we do; luckily FileMaker has responded with a much improved design surface. With themes and styles, conditional visibility, SVG icon support, and new layout objects, we can now use design and color to communicate with users in ways not previously possible (see, for example, the “Priorities” example in the accompanying demo file).
Continue reading “Fun with FileMaker Button Bars: Check Please”
If you’ve developed solutions with FileMaker for any length of time, you’ve almost certainly created files using FileMaker’s native Excel exports. Although quite useful, this feature gives almost no control over the formatting, and definitely no way to set formulas, charts, or even text formatting.
Continue reading “Excel formatting and charts from FileMaker using XlsxWriter”
Using a combination of AngularJS, HTML5, CSS, WKHTMLTOPDF, PDFtk, bBox and FileMaker scripting, we can create PDF reports from a FileMaker solution, taking advantage of the design and development flexibility afforded by using JavaScript and web tools to accomplish the task.
Continue reading “JavaScript-driven PDF Reports in FileMaker using AngularJS”
Xhtml2pdf is a cross-platform Python module that allows easy conversion of HTML or XML to PDF files. Its dependencies, ReportLab & Pisa, also have a host of very useful functions, including programmatically creating or modifying PDF content & creating barcodes.
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”
With everything that we’ve learned with our last post, Communicating with a Web Viewer in FileMaker, it makes sense to wrap up the functionality into a FileMaker module and JavaScript library.
Beezwax has always been active in the FileMaker community regarding advanced use of Web Viewers. Check out these earlier posts if you’d like to learn more:
Continue reading “Communicating with a Web Viewer in FileMaker”
If you are having difficulty getting your HTML, CSS, or JavaScript to render in a FileMaker Web Viewer, you may have a struggle ahead of you trying to find the problem, and no good way to debug it. In comparison, most web browsers have debug facilities that can help developers find problems in their code.
Continue reading “Enable WebKit debugger in FileMaker Web Viewer”
FileMaker Pro 14 includes a new feature to add placeholder text to fields on a layout. What is placeholder text? Simply put, it is a way to put text inside a field when it is empty. This feature is useful for mobile, web and desktop users alike.
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.
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.
FileMaker 14 introduces new controls available in the mobile FileMaker Go app that help to bring the media player experience in FM Go more in alignment with iOS. These changes, compatible only with FileMaker Go 14, include 3 new script steps, 3 new script triggers and 1 new calculation function. In addition, the script step Insert Quicktime has been removed (developers should use the Insert Audio/Video script step, which we have had since FileMaker 12).
Continue reading “FileMaker 14: Audio/Video Control Script Steps and Functions”
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.
Recently we’ve been thinking about how we can better monitor the collection of systems that we manage. These can be client servers with very diverse configurations, access, or functions. Additionally, we have our own array of systems, almost as diverse as our clients’.
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 )”
There are a number of ways of working with JSON data in FileMaker. At least two typical ones are:
Various times I’ve needed to do some quick summaries of how a given server and its databases were being used. When using Mac OS X, I may use shell commands to get a quick summary of what’s happening on a particular server.
Continue reading “Summarizing FileMaker Server Access.log data”
