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.
Download
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.
Besides being a bit of a mouthful, debugging Apache configuration issues has gotten slightly more complicated after Apple released the Server 2.2 update for Mac OS X Server.
Formerly, you could do a basic configuration check this way:
Continue reading “Debugging Apache with OSXS 10.8 Server 2.2”
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.
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.
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”
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 needed to investigate why a script was being run, and I was pretty sure cron was launching it. The problem was, little useful information was being logged, and no one was sure how it had been set up or what user it was under. Although launchd is now the preferred mechanism on Mac OS for these kinds of things, you’ll still see many systems where cron is being used.
First, you want to become the root user. The following Terminal command is one way to accomplish this:
sudo -s
Continue reading “List cron entries for all users on Mac OS X”
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”
