One of the most valuable aspects of 2011’s FileMaker Developers Conference in San Diego was a far-reaching discussion about the role of design in the FileMaker world. Design wasn’t the official theme of this year’s conference; but it was certainly among the most popular topics. A large number of sessions focused exclusively on design issues:
Inspired by Address Book – Part I: Hiding portal scroll bars
Posted in All, FileMaker, Techniques
On vacation, waking up to a dreary Pennsylvania morning…
I found myself staring at the OS X Address Book and wondering, “how did they do this?” I couldn’t help compare this little application to the many FileMaker-based contact management solutions I have seen, and concluding, a bit sadly, Apple’s is nicer.
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The FileMaker Ninja’s Toolbelt: TextMate Bundle
Posted in All, FileMaker, Tools & Add-ons
Welcome to the first installment of The FileMaker Ninja’s Toolbelt, an occasional series on various tools and techniques for taking your development in FileMaker to the next level.
Beyond the Calculation Dialog
The calculation dialog in FileMaker Pro is great for many things. It provides easy access to all of your fields, operators and functions. The Data Viewer in FileMaker Pro Advanced even shows you the calculation results.
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11 Tips for #FileMakerDevCon ’11
Posted in All, FileMaker, Techniques
As you may know FileMaker DevCon 2011 is just around the corner. In honor of 2011…and FileMaker Pro 11, here’s our list of Top 11 Tips for DevCon ’11:
1. Bring a sweater
Those hotels are known for cranking up the A/C. Take a comfortable layer that you can slip on and off easily to ward off the shivers as you’re sitting all morning.
Managing Files with AppleScript
Posted in All, FileMaker, Techniques
If you’re like most power FileMaker users, you’ve discovered that it’s a great tool for managing collections of things or for gathering disparate data sources for reporting. So you’ve probably wanted at some point to do one or more of these actions:
- Get a list of files on your computer
- Import a batch of files
- Move files on your computer
- Read the text of a file that doesn’t import correctly (e.g., HTML)
Does your FileMaker Go offline? (Previewing the new GoZync framework)
Posted in All, FileMaker, Tools & Add-ons
Some of us on the Beezwax team had the pleasure of watching John Sindelar and Todd Geist present their new GoZync framework at June’s DIGFM developer meetup. If you know anything about either of these fellows, you know that they are both very sharp and visionary developers. Now they’ve thrown their collective brain power at the problem of “How do mobile users work with their databases offline?”
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Unleashing Mac OS X’s Color Picker in FileMaker
Posted in All, FileMaker, Techniques
Color is one of the most important tools available to you when designing user interfaces. Using a little color can turn a drab wall of text into something attractive and readable.
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Beezwax Team Completes Speed-Developer Challenge at DIGFM
Posted in All, Beezwax News, FileMaker
Can you build an Assets Management database in FileMaker Pro in 80 minutes?
Thursday night Beezwax completed that challenge!
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FileMaker UX for Developers at PauseOnError
At PauseOnError, Vincenzo Menanno led the session on FileMaker User Experience (UX) for Developers, brainstorming how to improve the tools we use as FileMaker developers. There were a couple dozen participants, including Heather Winkle, Product Manager for User Experience at FileMaker Inc.
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PauseOnError – the FileMaker developer “Unconference”
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.
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Area Disclosure in FileMaker Using Sub-Summary Parts
Posted in All, Design, FileMaker, Techniques
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
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Charting from the Active Field
Posted in All, Design, FileMaker, Techniques
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
Port forward for a Cisco ASA using ASDM
Posted in All, Server Administration
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.
Use Replace Field to total found set
Posted in All, FileMaker, Techniques
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.
Removing intermediate directories
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”.
Using hostname for wiki with OSX Server
Posted in All, Server Administration
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:
Stop FileMaker server from script
Posted in All, FileMaker, Techniques
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
Top four FileMaker 11 features that improve the user experience
Posted in All, FileMaker, News, Techniques
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.
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Ruby scripting in FileMaker
[Authored by Alex G]
There are many cases where FileMaker’s scripting isn’t always the best tool for the job and where a language like Ruby can bring a lot of power to your FileMaker development. The following is a description of a simple technique for using ruby scripts from within a FileMaker solution without the use of a plugin. I’ve found this technique useful for employing regular expressions for complex text parsing, making web requests to work with web APIs, and for parsing and generating XML and other serialized data structures. Ruby has a wealth of great libraries for doing anything you can imagine and is just plain fun to write.
Setting permissions for FileMaker Server’s Database folder
Posted in All, FileMaker, Server Administration, Techniques
The Problem
Most FileMaker Server setups on OSX that I have seen are using the default permissions as set by the FilerMaker Server (FMS) installer. When viewed in the Terminal, they look like this:
drwxrwxr-x 11 fmserver fmsadmin 374 Jul 16 12:54 Databases
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