Custom Functions For Today’s FileMaker Devs Of Tomorrow

While working from home, and continuing to hone one’s FileMaker skills, it’s important for developers to stay active with ongoing learning pursuits. Claris® FileMaker®, as the world’s leading Workplace Innovation Platform, supports both the rapid creation of new custom apps, as well as the practical application of solutions to solve real-world business problems. Here, creative ideation is critical.

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Math in a FileMaker field, for Inputter’s sake

Editor’s Note: An often-ignored reality of data management is that entering data, correctly and cleanly, into all of these database apps we build can be a royal pain in the…
Assumptions can be dangerous, like assuming that your office manager-doubling-as-bookkeeper wants to manually calculate tax on every Invoice row. Or even has the time to.

Not many job titles (anymore) are simply “Data Entry Manager,” and yet entering data is a task that continually must be managed, by one or by many, in the role of “Inputter”. Just entering data can be tedious enough — so, let’s not make it harder. In fact, let’s strive to make it easier. With that in mind, Beezwax Senior Developer Christos Savva provides an example of performing math in a FileMaker field, using a custom function. This is designed to improve data entry user experience, for the sake of Inputters everywhere.

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SystemVersion – When numbers are not what they seem!

I recently moved to OS X Yosemite, and once again repeated the annual cycle of wondering whether or not my existing solutions will be compatible with the new version. I’ve loved using AppleScript to trigger OS X Notifications from FileMaker since they were introduced in OS X Mavericks, but they stopped working as soon as I installed Yosemite.

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Just a Slice, Please…

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?

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Go, JavaScript Go!

Introduction

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.

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Good Sir William’s Heirs

Demo file:  Sir_Williams_Heirs_fp7

That old Bard, good Sir William, is nearing the end of his life. Having already provided well for his five children, he now seeks to divide his literary empire among his eleven grandchildren:

FamilyTree 1

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Unleashing Mac OS X’s Color Picker in FileMaker

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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