In February, four Beez traveled to New York for PauseOnError, the annual winter gathering of FileMaker developers. PauseOnError runs as an “Unconference”; attendees organize the entire agenda, and work together to support presentations and ad-hoc discussions. This makes for a highly-relevant and participatory experience.
Continue reading “PauseOnError – the FileMaker developer “Unconference””
The attached file demonstrates a technique for opening/closing areas of a record, allowing a user to hide the information they don’t want to see.
FileMaker File: DisclosureAreas2.fp7
Continue reading “Area Disclosure in FileMaker Using Sub-Summary Parts”
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
I wanted to quickly create a firewall port forward (AKA NAT rule) for the Terminal Services port on a Cisco ASA 5505. Since it had initially been setup using ASDM, it seemed natural to also create the port forward this way.
I recently needed to total up some records in a found set in a FileMaker solution, but I wanted to keep all the revisions within the scripts so that I could easily migrate the changes from the development system to production. This solution also already had quite a few “special case” calcs and fields, and I didn’t want to add any more clutter to the schema.
We recently needed to remove the intermediate directories in a large number of parent directories. So, if we started with /A/B/C/D, we wanted to end up with /A/B/D. It seemed simple at the time, so I blithely said “Sure, I can write that easily as a shell script”.
We have a wiki server running Mac OS X Server 10.6, and rather than have users type something like this:
http://bbox.beezwax.net/groups/bbox
which would be the standard URL, we instead wanted to use the much simpler:
If you have a FileMaker system and you need to script the processing of adding or removing files on the server, the first problem you are going to come across is: how do I stop the server from a script?
You may already be familiar with the fmsadmin command. This is present on both Mac OS and Windows installs of FileMaker server. You can simply run the following command in Terminal to stop the server:
fmsadmin stop server
FileMaker 11 is here! Are you ready for the next generation of the world’s most widely used, easy-to-use database?
As Platinum members of the FileMaker Business Alliance and long-term beta testers with FileMaker, we’ve been testing the new version of FileMaker for a while now and wanted to share some of what we’ve learned.
Continue reading “Top four FileMaker 11 features that improve the user experience”
