FileMaker Fever

Developer Productivity in FileMaker Pro 9 Awesome

I'm getting incredible productivity in FileMaker Pro 9 Advanced. The Advanced features help mainly in the debugging phase. The regular Pro 9 features help in development with the multiple script windows open while I test.

All the pieces are in place now to be very efficient as a developer.

I'm in the middle of a project converting a FileMaker 5.5 system to FileMaker 9. This is way fun. I'm taking multiple scripts and cranking out single script parameter and variable driven versions in a couple minutes. Maybe its the growing experience along with the fine-tuning FileMaker Inc. has done in 9.

A great experience. FMI has put it all together. I expect you'll be hearing a lot about FileMaker 9 here and elsewhere.

My Ten Reasons to Upgrade to FileMaker 9

Just a note to let you know I wrote a new entry on the front page of my FileMaker Kingdom page on the above subject. Scroll past the Big Picture preliminaries and you'll see my top 10 reasons to upgrade. If you aren't already on FileMaker 8.5, you can continue down the page to see more reasons included in previous upgrades. This is my personal list. What I like and a little bit about why.

First FileMaker 9 Review I have Seen

MacWorld has a short but good review of FileMaker 9 out already. Since I haven't written my own thoughts yet, I thought it would be helpful to point you to this in the meantime.

Well written. Friendly to FileMaker by someone who seems to know it well. The author, William Porter, is an independent database developer and writer in Dallas. William is the founder of Polytrope LLC and is a classics scholar with a penchant for FileMaker. Sounds like a neat guy. I hope we can meet up at the Developer's Conference this year.

Some Highlights:

FileMaker 9 can, by itself, serve to up to 9 FileMaker clients (without using FileMaker Server). The previous limit was 5. It used to be 10 before FileMaker 7. That's a nice thing when a client is trying to get started and wants to cut some corners temporarily to get in the game.

There's a cool PHP Site Assistant feature now. FileMaker 9 still has instant web publishing and custom web publishing but now FileMaker Server 9 gives us an intermediate option - a PHP site creation tool that is extendable. Instant Web Publishing is fantastic as far as it goes, but it has a fairly low ceiling. If you need something else, you are stuck. But, the easy PHP stuff here can be programmed additionally to handle extras and exceptional situations. I will be brushing up on my PHP pronto because of this tool that gives you a jump start.

FileMaker Server 9 and Server 9 Advanced are much easier to install. I rarely install FileMaker Server, but I do know my customers have frequently gotten stuck trying to get it up and running. I always attributed it to short attention spans and unwillingness to crack up the documentation, but, the new versions apparently can be installed in around 20 minutes, William, says.

FileMaker 9 should in almost all cases be compatible with FileMaker 7, 8 and 8.5 databases. William says: “it's reassuring to know that upgrading to FileMaker 9 is not going to break anything”. This means you can operate with some users on one version and some on another but remember that if a feature is Filemaker 9-specific, it won't work in earlier versions. That's the reason to consider a maintenance contract so you can just put a maintenance payment into your annual software budget to keep your software current.

You can now easily create interactions between FileMaker databases and the big iron SQL databases. FileMaker 9 can talk to MySQL, MS SQL and Oracle databases. That covers most of what's out there. This will be helpful when you want to connect to web-based databases which are often MySQL or corporate databases that typically use Oracle or MS SQL.

You can combine filemaker reports into one PDF. This is practically my favorite new feature. Now I can create a single invoice pdf that actually involves three different pieces such as a cover page, a middle detail piece and terms. Very handy. Previously, you had to resort to buying and integrating an external plug-in to get this functionality.

William promises a more extensive review for MacWorld.com. This initial review was technically called a “first look”.

Technorati Tags: FileMaker 9, PHP

Customizing with FileMaker Pro 8.5, Part 1

I have long intended to write more about how to customize my FileMaker-based Studio Manager product. I thought I would blog about FileMaker and use simple examples from Studio Manager along the way. First off, are some essential FileMaker resources at your disposal.

Studio Manager is about 99% unlocked. It is targeted towards firms and individuals who want to shape their mission critical software, at least to some extent, to their own unique needs.

To get the full value out of any FileMaker-based product (that is not locked up tighter than a drum), you need to get your hands dirty and learn a little FileMaker.

When I made a mind map on the subject of customizing Studio Manager, the first thing I noticed is that fully 80% of the topics were simply FileMaker basics. I realized that it makes no sense for me to duplicate what is already in the 108-page FileMaker 8 User Manual that comes in the box.

By the way, even though FileMaker Pro 8.5 is a $100 upgrade to FileMaker Pro 8, it is still FileMaker Pro 8 and therefore, the user manual is a guide to FileMaker Pro 8, not 8.5. FMI provides a one page listing of 8.5's new features in the installation guide (see cover below) but the informational meat about FM 8.5 is in the online help.

Attention Beginners: you gotta check out and use the FileMaker Pro 8 User's Guide if you want to take charge of your database and make it do your bidding.

I am going to slant this series towards people who have purchased a FileMaker Pro 8.5 template or who have chosen to use one of the free FileMaker templates that come in the box.

Now is the time to crack open the user manual and learn a little bit about FileMaker. There is a great little overview of FileMaker on pages 9, 10 and 11 that will give you a thumbnail sketch of what FileMaker can do. The bottom of page 11 and all of page 12 tell you what is new in FileMaker 8 which is of interest if you are upgrading from a previous version of FileMaker.

This is a well-produced manual. The pages are horizontal, 6“ x 9” with two columns. Very readable and friendly. Every time I cover something related to this manual, I will give you a page reference so that you can get the straight scoop from FileMaker. And then I will embellish, provide examples and apply the basics. I will provide the real-world portion based on my 20 years of FileMaker customizing experience.

When you buy FileMaker, you get a full pdf of the user manual too. It installs automatically when you install FileMaker if you choose the default install. Two cool things about a PDF, (1) you can get to it without getting up and finding your manual and (2) it is great if you have lost your manual and (3) it is searchable by keyword.

I should mention another resource in case you are not aware. FileMaker Inc. is currently giving away an introductory ebook on FileMaker Pro 8.5 when you buy a copy of FileMaker. It is called: Creating a Database in FileMaker Pro 8.5 and is a Visual QuickProject book. What is cool about this book is it is totally hands on. You are led step-by-step through a FileMaker project. This is a great way to get yourself over the hump of actually using FIleMaker as a casual developer. Highly recommended.

By the way, Amazon is selling FileMaker Pro 8.5 with free shipping for $268.99 as of this writing. You can get the ebook this way too. The free ebook deal expires on June 21st and does not apply to upgrades. For details. You can see and read some book excerpts on O'Reilly's book page by clicking the Start Reading Online button.

FileMaker users can be classified into the following groups:
(1) data-entry basic
(2) data-entry advanced
(3) data users
(4) advanced users
(5) beginning developers
(6) intermediate developers
(7) advanced developers
(8) professional developers

If you have been tasked with entering data into a FileMaker database to perhaps enter all your company contacts and that is all you plan to do, you do not need these references. Just get a 15-minute briefing about the specific entry screen and data you need to enter and be on your way.

Otherwise, you are going to benefit greatly from these information sources. If you are already advanced, chances are you are more committed to learning FileMaker and even though you will know quite a bit of what is in these resources, there is always that tidbit now and then that will make the reading worth your while. Read for your type of use or development and skip over what doesn't interest or apply.

The Online Help. Don't forget the online help when you have FileMaker already fired up. Sometimes, if you have a big screen, it is easier to just have the online help open beside your database and use it there when you have a question.

Just type Cmd-? or choose FileMaker Pro Help from the Help menu. Beginners should click the first link called FileMaker Pro Basics and go from there. FileMaker's online help is an invaluable reference. It greatly exceeds the printed user manual in the depth of its coverage.

These introductory comments are just the tip of the iceberg on this topic. I intend to talk about creating and modifying layouts very soon. Perhaps by the time you read this, you will see several other posts in this series. Our goal for the Studio Manager product is to create an entire little manual on customizing Studio Manager.

These blog posts are intended to be chunks of content that will go into our customizing manual. We just didn't want to wait until the whole manual was done to get the information out to you. As my fellow developer and creator of FileMaker Magazine, Matt Petrowsky, says, happy FileMaking!

Relationship Graph Post-it Notes Pay Off

It took me a while, but now I am a believer. I just posted 2 notes into the relationships graph for Studio Manager 8. One note is a legend that shows what all my abbreviations mean and the other note is a general guide to how I have set-up and organized the relationships graph. I now see that these two notes should be a standard practice for any FileMaker database these days. Nice.

You can pick your colors for the post-its from the color wheel, so have at it!

Technorati Tags: Relationships Graph

Address Book Manipulator Looks Good

Productive Computing has just released version 2 of their Address Book Manipulator plug-in. They've done a lot of work to make it easy for the rest of us to talk to Address Book from our FileMaker databases. With the help of this plug-in, you can push a record to address book and you can pull an Address Book record into FileMaker.

One of the buttons available on the Pull tab is All Contacts. That lets you pull every Address Book entry you have into the demo FileMaker file. With the demo! I just imported all 1588 Address Book entries I have in my Address Book into the demo file. I could now import this data into the FileMaker file of my choosing.

That's great for starters. But the most important functionality here is that you can keep the two in sync by moving data from Address Book to FileMaker or FileMaker to Address Book depending on where you happen to enter the data first.

Because Productive's plug-in is probably written in a low-level language like C, performance is, as they say, lightning fast. Also, I'm running on a MacBook so I am also getting the benefit of the fact that this is a Universal plug-in that works optimally on both PowerPC and Intel processors.

Here's the link for their press release dated November 7.

The Plug-in is selling for $60 for a single-user license, $270 for a 5-user license and $432 for a 10-user license. If you have a mission-critical FileMaker application in your company or work group that includes a contacts table and you are Mac-based, Address Book Manipulator v2 could be just what you need.

A free demo version of the plug-in is available with a full-access demo FileMaker file that can push and pull data and demonstrate various additional functions including search. I'm using it right now.

Here is what the relationships graph looks like. On the left is a *viewer* table and on the right is the *data* table where the contacts are stored in flat records.

I Love FileMaker 8.5 Tab Controls

Yes. I know Tab Controls were released in FileMaker 8. But, without a Go to Object command and other niceties like the GetLayoutObjectAttribute function, they weren't ready to replace all tabs all the time.

Many of you might still cling to your homemade tabs. Not me. I've committed 100% to tab controls to handle all (well almost all) of my tabbing needs.

You can make fancy fake tabs and use any graphics you want for the tabs. But that's so FileMaker 7 of you. The problem is fake tabs are not end-user friendly. They aren't even developer friendly in my opinion.

Instead, use tab controls. They can look pretty boring by default. But take away some of the old-fashioned styling and they become elegant. Native vs. bolted on. Native looks better my friends. Since most of my customers are designers, I pay close attention to ways to make my UI look better.

Tab controls can be used to simplify. Compare the default User tab above to the Admin tab below. Users, even Admin people, don't need to see all the information all the time (Keep in mind that there are other fields on the screen. The user is just not being bothered with all the information as he or she uses the database).

Tab controls are revolutionary because they let our users customize their own interface. That's heresy you say. That breaks the rules of keeping the user in his place. Yes. And that's the wave of the future that you might want to embrace. FileMaker is the database of choice because it empowers the user.

You know that thing where everything isn't top down. That user who is on the front lines where all the new information is. That's the user who knows what he or she needs.

I go on about tab controls as they pertain to my Studio Manager product over on Studio Manager Bulletin. The treatment there is not very technical but is very enthusiastic. I'm thrilled to be using tab controls instead of fake tabs in my product.

One of the main features of Studio Manager is that it maximizes user customizability. Studio Manager is not a black box. Not to developers and not to users. Deal with it.

FMDiff is Very Useful

I just found a really helpful tool. It's called FMDiff and is made by Huslik Verlag GmbH in Germany. It's late on the Labor Day weekend day 1 - Saturday and I don't have a lot of time to write.

The important thing is that FMDiff will identify places where there are differences in scripts, fields, value lists and layouts between any two FileMaker files of the same file format. And it does the comparison in less than a minute even with my big Studio Manager product.

Just like anyone else, I occasionally have a confusion about which version of a FileMaker file is the most recent. And sometimes, I have guessed wrong which has led to there being some things added or modified in File A and other things added or modified to File B. This tool will help me resolve those questions. Invaluable!

I'm very pleased to have a tool that can do this so simply. By the way, the tool doesn't use FileMaker at all. It is written in C++ and just somehow manages to compare the two files piece by piece.

If you think you might be interested, there is a free, limited version which you can use to try it out. FMDiff costs $199. As a professional FileMaker developer, I'm glad it wasn't more because I have to have this tool.

HVG has another product that also seems very interesting called FMChecker. The version that will work on FileMaker 7-8.5 files is not yet available but scheduled to be released in early 2007. It seems to have more valuable features that I'll want.

FileMaker 8 Certified

I'm a member of a group of Marin county FileMaker consultants. In April we decided to use the group to study for and try to pass the FileMaker 8 Certification test. We bought copies of the big FileMaker Professional Training Foundation Series III book for FileMaker 8.

Then we divided the chapters among us with various members choosing chapters to teach to the rest of the group. We met every two weeks for about 3 hours on Monday evenings. In between meetings we did our homework which was to read the chapters and do the practice exercises.

At the meetings, we had two presenters for two chapters (along with 2 backups in case someone had an emergency and couldn't present). One of our members brought his projector and one donated the conference space available to him for our meetings. We met at 6:30 pm in downtown San Rafael and grabbed a burrito, sandwich or ate prior.

All of us were already very busy with our FileMaker consultancies but we wanted to master FileMaker 8 and figured the certification credential wouldn't hurt. If others were getting certified, what did that say about those of us who weren't?

It seemed like a perfect opportunity. We agreed that members who had an area of special expertise would teach their strength to the rest of us. Since most of us do training in the course of our work, we had the benefit of some pretty good trainers within our group.

Our group was all about sharing knowledge and learning anyway, so why not point it at the certification credential and see what happened? We saw it as a kind of bootcamp team. Imagining that if one of us was struggling to make it over the fence, others of us could help.

We had agreed to take the test together at the end of our studying in July. When we finished our studies in mid-July, all but one of us felt ready to take the test. As planned, the day before the test, we did a 4 hour review together on Sunday and then crammed individually that night and the next morning. The five of us took the test on July 24th at 3 pm allowing time for celebration afterwards. Happy Day, we all passed!

When you take the test, you are swarn to secrecy (sign a non-disclosure agreement) to not reveal anything about the nature of the test itself, so I have to end my story here. Framed certification certificates arrived by FedEx within the week. It actually looks really good hanging in my office where my clients and colleagues can see it. Of course, probably most important, where I can see it.

It felt good to do the work. It was great working as a team. And well, we learned a lot. Filling in the holes in our knowledge where they existed. The learning makes me all the more enthused about FileMaker 8.5 and FileMaker in general.

I'm really enjoying my development work these days. The kick in computer work has always been that feeling of awe and accomplishment when you build something really cool. I've got lots of neat tools (toys) to play with these days. They make me look good.

Technorati Tags: FileMaker 8

Duplicate Record with AppleScript Trick

I received a request to tie my Studio Manager product to iCal yesterday. This is not the first time I have received the request. I am just recovering from a brief illness today and with that excuse thought I would see how hard it would be to AppleScript between FileMaker and iCal.

I have two books that should help me: AppleScript: The Missing Manual and AppleScript: The Definitive Guide. I looked at their tables of contents but didn't see any reference to iCal. So, I then typed "AppleScript+FileMaker+iCal" into Google. I got plenty of hits to investigate.

One of my first hits lead me to reading a comment about speed. And Bruce Robertson had a tip. He said if you run the following two line Applescript in FileMaker you can instantaneously duplicate a record and all of its children records.

So I decided to try it myself.

I created a FileMaker database called AppleScript_Playground and added three tables Contacts, Jobs and Tasks. These are tables in Studio Manager. I put in a few fields in each table. I figured eventually I would get to trying to import a set of tasks for a job into AppleScript.

But for now I wanted to try the trick.

So I created a layout in Jobs with a few fields and a portal to tasks. I entered some tasks. See illustration below.

Bruce said you should not have any calculated fields on the layout if you want the trick to work. I have no idea why, but he was right. Until I removed the last calculation field from the layout, it wouldn't work. You also need to have the ability to create the child records turned on and don't have the auto-enter serial number on the screen.

Anyway, if you have an auto-enter serial number for Jobs and that serial number is part of the key that links tasks to jobs, you are in business.

Here's my applescript compliments of Bruce:

Set sourceRec to (get current record)
Create new record with data sourceRec

There's only one script step in the script: Perform Applescript.

Bruce says it should be instantaneous with up to 50 related records.

At the moment this small triumph encourages me to continue my quest. Maybe this AppleScript stuff is worth looking into. I know a lot of FileMaker buffs swear by AppleScript...

UPDATE: I just tried it with Job Specs, a second related table. The duplicate as is above duplicated the original record plus the related records in both portals on the screen instantly! Try this out as a 20 minute project if you aren't already an AppleScripter who knows this stuff backwards and forwards.