How do you begin designing a new database or application? If you start with an Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD), you’re doing it wrong.
It’s natural for a technical person to begin categorizing things into entities – a company has contacts, which have addresses, etc. But this process immediately narrows your perspective to a small subset of the issues at hand, blinding you to many more important challenges and opportunities.
It comes up time and again: “How can I send a formatted email from FileMaker?” You see, FileMaker natively supports only plain text emails; you’re on your own if you want rich text or HTML. But it is possible! Here’s a list of options for (nearly) painlessly sending HTML emails from FileMaker.
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.
We’re pleased to announce three Beez who earned the title of FileMaker 12 Certified Developer.
FileMaker 12 Certification is the official credential offered by FileMaker, Inc., certifying a developer as achieving an “essential level of knowledge, experience and skills in developing FileMaker 12 solutions.”
Continue reading “Our First FileMaker 12 Certified Developers”
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”
MIAMI, Fla. – July 16, 2012 – Beezwax Datatools, Inc. today announced InspectorPro 4, a major new version of the leading developer tool for FileMaker 12 database analysis. Rewritten from the ground up to take advantage of FileMaker 12’s new architecture, InspectorPro 4 is up to 10 times faster than previous versions at processing FileMaker Database Design Reports. New features provide deeper analysis of database elements, a central dashboard, localized UI options, and powerful data visualizations – enabling FileMaker developers to discover more about their databases than ever before.
Continue reading “[PR] Beezwax Announces InspectorPro 4 for FileMaker 12”
Software changes over time. Your company’s web site this year does things you had no idea you needed two years ago. How can we keep the cost of change manageable?
Automated testing is one way. Especially for large software projects, the practice of automated testing can dramatically reduce the cost of adapting software to new business necessities.
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.
