Curated Technology News with a focus on FileMaker and WordPress
Have you ever wanted to build a custom app for your computer or tablet?
Do you have too many LEGO building sets and no organized way to keep track of them?
FileMaker 101 provides an overview of the FileMaker platform followed by a tutorial that explains step-by-step how to create a useful custom application (database) to manage you or your kids’ LEGO collection. The video is about 1 hour long.
Find out about custom software, user interface design, filemaker, application design, mac, pc, ios.
Warm up with an overview of the FileMaker platform, based in part on the “FileMaker Code Objects as ERD”. See how FileMaker code is optimally distributed across FileMaker Code Objects (and why).
According to the FileMaker Pro 17 Advanced Help, there are two options on how to create charts:
Create a quick chart in Browse mode.
Use the Chart tool in Layout mode to create a chart.
Since this article is aimed at developers, I will be taking a look at the second point here. In addition, I would add:
Using the WebViewer to create charts. (Another post for another day)
Todd kicked off the meeting by describing what Developer Ops means. DevOps (as we call it) is anything that will help automate the processes you have to go through when you have to manage a FileMaker Server and FileMaker Applications.
As a small business in Portland, Oregon, we offer custom app development, database consulting, and FileMaker training. We strive to help you streamline your business, saving you time and money in the process.
Back when FileMaker 3 was new, I added inventory management to a FileMaker template that allowed an Assembly Item to be a collection of other Items, including other Assembly Items. The inclusion of other Assembly Items (which might also contain Assembly Items) means that a full Bill Of Materials (BoM) for a “parent” Assembly Item is best represented as a hierarchical list that clarifies the relationships between each component and its “ancestor” and “descendant” Items.
We recently had a request from a customer to generate snail mail letters and reminders from their FileMaker solution. Rather than generic bulk mail, this is highly personalized correspondence–the kind of thing you’d normally send by email–they just wanted this done with physical mail. Think of a PDF or receipt containing order history, for example.
Gonector is a FileMaker plug-in that allows a native application for iPhone or iPad to communicate directly with mobile hardware devices. Being able to interact with professional mobile devices enables you to use the FileMaker platform to create a POS, Inventory and lots of other heavy-duty mobile business apps with friendly, fast, and reliable user interface.
Square is one of the most popular in-person credit card processing systems available with over 2 million sellers using square today. Using the Point of Sale API, Square allows you to easily integrate with their Point of Sale app to quickly process in-person payments from your FileMaker application on mobile devices.
How secure is your FileMaker solution?
AppWorks attended the PauseOnSecurity conference in October of 2018, which ignited our passion for security. The conference findings were surprising, and we learned that many servers and databases previously thought secure are not. We also learned how to secure them.
FileMaker introduced a very different kind of capability with the ExecuteSQL function. First introduced in FileMaker 12, it allows you to perform “select” queries against your FileMaker data, as opposed to the more familiar “Find” functionality available in FileMaker.
SQL (Structured Query Language) is a standard used with other, more traditional, database servers. Using SQL, SELECTS on indexed data is blazing fast and efficient. It allows you to construct relationships in SQL that do not necessarily exist in your application otherwise.
There have been many useful techniques that have been demonstrated since its introduction. This post will detail and explain yet another technique of the ExecuteSQL function – Search as You Type.
Carafe is an open platform for working with JavaScript in FileMaker.
It allows you to browse, deploy, create, and/or share JavaScript components in FileMaker.
Ever since the advent of the Web Viewer, JavaScript has been a native language in FileMaker.
Have you ever run into issues with PDFs not displaying in FileMaker Pro? Does your interactive container field show a loading bar or empty box when you know the field contains a PDF? I’ve run into this issue in two different environments and found that there can be two different causes. In this blog I’ll share the solutions that worked for me.
Portable Document Format (PDF) files are everywhere. The PDF file format was created by Adobe as a file format for the print industry to exchange documents that would preserve the author’s intended formatting. With PDF, it didn’t matter if a file was created with a font that isn’t on your computer or linked images were missing, because the font and images would be embedded with the file. It doesn’t matter if the file was created with Microsoft Word or InDesign or even on a Mac or a Windows computer. Once exported to PDF, the file would look and print the same across platforms. In addition to the free Adobe Acrobat Reader, there are a number of free and paid apps that work with the open PDF file format standard. One we like a lot for macOS is Smile Software’s PDFpen.
Does your organization suffer from having many disconnected and disjointed systems? Likely over time you’ve implemented a lot of software tools that each do a specific function well, but each one operates independently, meaning the information contained in each one is not shared and requires redundant data entry into other tools, which is both time consuming and expensive. We call these systems data silos…each one unique and independent, making collaboration and sharing a challenge.
Unlike images, video files, audio files, and PDF files, we cannot directly view [Microsoft Office] file formats within container fields. Developers tend to resort to exporting the files to disk and auto-opening them locally on the users machine. This however requires that the user have a copy of Microsoft Word, Office, or PowerPoint installed in order to view the file they wish to see. This is not always the case.
In this article we’re going to show how you can add Excel, Word or PowerPoint document viewing to any existing FileMaker solution in about 10 minutes, the setup couldn’t be simpler!
The FileMaker Developer Conference is coming up later this summer August 5-8 held at the Gaylord Palms Resort near Orlando, Florida.
FM Quizillaa is for developers who to LEARN-EXPERIENCE-PRACTICE for FileMaker 17 or 16 certification. For more info: https://www.metasyssoftware.com/fm-quizillaa
The FileMaker Web Viewer object is as powerful as it is exasperating. There’s a lot to know when using it. Many people have a lot of knowledge about the object. There’s countless blog posts, example files, and even answers here in the forums with nuggets of information.