Archives July 2018

This month’s Meetup started off with a demo from Matt Navarre of the newly released fmLog 2.0, a simple yet powerful FileMaker logging system developed by AppWorks. It is now available as a free download from our website.

The group then received a sneak peak of Chris Irvine’s DevCon 2018 presentation, Crypto Building Blocks for FileMaker Developers. Be sure to check out Chris’s session in Dallas the afternoon of August 8th. We look forward to seeing you there!

Imagine this scenario:
At 4:47 p.m. Fred in sales opens the company’s FileMaker system and navigates to the contact list layout. He selects a contact and clicks a button to print a report of communications in the last three months. A beach ball icon spins for a few seconds, but nothing prints. Assuming something is wrong with the printer, Fred submits a ticket with the IT support desk and goes home for the day.

The next morning, Carrie in marketing wants a list of contacts added to the database in the last month. She logs in and perform a find, but strangely, no contacts show up. She tries again a different way, but gets the same result. Manually scanning the contact table confirms her suspicion: the records are missing. She submits an urgent support ticket to have the most recent backup restored. As the developer of the database, you receive this request minutes later.

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With the release of FileMaker 16 came the Card Windows feature, one that I’m still really excited about – seriously! You can read more about them here, but in this post we’ll be covering their ability to display layouts from external files.

This can be accomplished in two ways, depending on what type of information you are trying to display. The Go To Related Record script step (which we’ll cover first) can easily be configured to display related data from another file using a layout that already exists in that other file. This is a great time-saver if you already have an established relationship between the tables in each file. For a nearly limitless method, we can use the New Window script step to open any layout existing in another file (not just the related data) with a few extra steps. This second option is especially useful for modularization in your solutions.

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