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
As part of a shell script I’m cooking up, one of the required tasks is to list all currently hosted database files on a Mac OS based FileMaker server. This may get deployed over multiple servers, and I want to keep it as simple and trouble free as possible.
Continue reading “Listing hosted FileMaker files from the shell”
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.
Read the follow up to this blog post at What Are Your Imports Waiting For? FileMaker Perform Script on Server – Part II
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”
Applets now are required to contain additional information in their .jnlp files to document the files used, either external or local. But if you are working with older code, such as the FileMaker 11 Server Admin Console, the required manifest information is missing and your applet will halt with an exception like this:
java.lang.SecurityException: Missing required Permissions manifest attribute in main jar: http://localhost:16000/admin-client-lib/admin-console-client.jar
at com.sun.deploy.security.DeployManifestChecker.verifyMainJar(Unknown Source)
at com.sun.deploy.security.DeployManifestChecker.verifyMainJar(Unknown Source)
at com.sun.javaws.Launcher.doLaunchApp(Unknown Source)
at com.sun.javaws.Launcher.run(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:744)
I was looking for a way to monitor client usage of FileMaker Servers over time.
Continue reading “Enable Logging of Client Usage Statistics in FileMaker Server”
This technique uses filterable portals contained in FileMaker 13’s new Popover object to provide user-friendly pop-up menu behavior.
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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”
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”
Our previous post highlighted the new capabilities of the venerable FileMaker button. In FileMaker 12’s Design Surface, the once-humble button gains new-found expressive power, enabling it to respond fluidly to user hovers, taps, and clicks via what we termed interactive formatting. The catch: interactive buttons — whether in FileMaker 12, or on any other platform — are prone to semantic misinformation, in which interactive formatting unintentionally misleads and confuses users.
Continue reading “Button Up 2: Building State-Aware Buttons”
We needed to quickly know how often various databases were being opened on a client’s server.
If you have Access logging enabled and are using a Mac OS based system, this shell snippet will give you a nice summary of how often each database has been opened:
awk -F" '{ if($3 == " opening database ") print $4;}' '/Library/FileMaker Server/Logs/Access.log' | sort | uniq -c
Unfortunately, it won’t show you a count for databases that were never opened within the scope of the current access log.
Simon.
I needed to configure a FileMaker Server (FMS) that would be an isolated system and accessible via the Internet.
Besides other precautions, like locking it down on the firewall as much as possible, changing the default SSH port, etc., I wanted to give the system some ability to defend itself against malicious access. FMS will prevent this to some extent, largely due to how the FMS Admin Console and the FileMaker client are designed.
I was trying to test out some HTTP post transactions with the curl command, and things weren’t working.
One glitch was due to how the curl command parses its options. All characters, including spaces can be significant, so “-X POST” is not the same as “-XPOST”. This difference might be hidden if calling from the shell, which trims extraneous spaces in parameters, but I was calling via the bBox plug-in’s curl function, and this calls the command directly from FileMaker.
I wanted to code sign a runtime to avoid issues with users who had the higher security level set on their 10.8 based systems. Although lowering these permissions or holding down the control key when the app is launched will all help with this issue, code signing seems a reasonable and desirable, and removed the support issue.
Consider the humble button.
Since the very first moments of FileMaker cosmos, the button has been an essential element of our platform. Over the years, across major and minor product releases, the unassuming button has remained a trusted constant and a dependable workhorse.
Here’s an interesting FileMaker challenge:
How can you dynamically slice off a set of values from a repeating field in a related table, the way you’d grab a column of values in a spreadsheet?
It’s easy enough to do this for a single repeating field in the current record, but how do you do this with a repeating field in a different table, operating not just on a single record, but an entire record set?
In order to more easily work with XML data, I’ve added the libxml2 library to version 0.54 of the bBox plug-in.
Among other things, libxml2 provides support for XPath 1.0 queries, which can be used to easily extract or set values from XML data, so XPath was my first choice. Although XML has lost a bit of its shine as JSON has come into vogue, XML is still integral to many systems, including FileMaker. Also, the XPath routines can be used for similar syntaxes, so for instance, you might find it helpful for scraping data from a HTML page.
It’s hard to believe it’s been only a few months since SQL was introduced as part of FileMaker 12.
Continue reading “FileMaker 12 SQL: Crafting Structural Beauty”
You gotta love FileMaker Go. Go’s ability to effortlessly create data-driven mobile apps and extend existing desktop data applications to mobile users is transformative. But sooner or later, almost all of us run up against one of Go’s core limitations: its lack of native plugins.
I wanted to do some conditional formatting, such that when a global field had a certain value the label would change its appearance. For example, if my sort column was “address”, then I wanted the column header containing the text “Address” to highlight.
Continue reading “Getting a FileMaker label’s text in a conditional formula”
