If you’ve been developing in FileMaker for any length of time, you’ve probably visited FileMakerHacks.com. Kevin Frank’s website delves into very creative hacks to make the impossible happen. Then works to find faster alternatives to the same problem, often reaching out to the FileMaker community for solutions. Recent work has focused on finding duplicate records […]
Ralph Learmont gets top billing from Kevin Frank for his script that quickly de-dupes a found set and returns the remains of the found set when finished. And the best part: The script is completely portable. The only caveat is you must select the field you want used to de-dupe the set. The script […]
Here’s an interesting twist on the usual from FileMakerHacks. As most developers soon figure out, the best way to display/print reports in FileMaker is to start with the proper context. For example, to print an invoice, the proper context is the table where the Line Item info is stored, not the table containing the Customer […]
I HAVE WANTED TO DO THIS A FEW TIMES BEFORE, but never bad enough to pursue a solution: Have you ever wanted to have a script toggle the Formatting Bar on/off in browse mode? If so, you will discover that FileMaker does not provide a “Show/Hide Formatting Bar” script step. Follow the link to see […]
I’LL ADMIT IT: I haven’t done much translating to and from Unicode. Kevin Franks has, and with an assist from Jeremy Bante, put together a FileMaker utility file with all of the conversions. This weekend I threw together a Unicode utility file (unicode-characters.zip). It takes the values 1 through 65535 and converts them into Unicode symbols, […]
AN INTERESTING LOOK at unintended consequences when working on a live FileMaker database by Kevin Franks. I’ve experienced occasional problems when doing so and was not able to reproduce them. It seems that if a user adds a new record (manually or via script) while the developer is doing any of the following causes the problem: […]
A VERY SLICK WAY to bypass a slow custom function and speed up drawing a chart. The second thing you’ll note is that performance (assuming you’re testing this locally, not on a LAN or WAN) is quite zippy — on my machine it takes about 1 second to process 50,000 records, and less than 2 seconds […]
THE PROPER USE of position functions makes is possible to do all kinds of neat tricks. FileMakerHacks developed an inverse type of function to allow something not natively available in FileMaker: But what if we want to go the other way? Can we perform inverse operations for the above examples? In other words, if we […]
Another good post on Popover menu’s – there are lots of ways to use that great little feature to great effect.
Generating Sample Data Posted on December 1, 2013 by Kevin Frank Print PDF Have you ever wanted to generate sample data for one of your solutions that was random in certain ways, but within a defined range or scope? For example, from an existing table of customers… choose 20 at random create between 4 and 8 invoices for each […]
Three techniques exploring summary reporting… Summary Reporting Tricks Posted on September 12, 2013 by Kevin Frank Print PDF One of the best ways to learn about a particular FileMaker feature or behavior is to build a demo. You might build one in response to a client request, or to try to answer a question somone […]
PDF Catalog with Table of Contents Posted on July 13, 2013 by Kevin Frank Print PDF Recently I was asked by a client whether we could produce a PDF catalog from his company’s database, with products grouped by manufacturer. Me: “Of course, this is FileMaker.” Him: “Can it have a table of contents?” Me: “Yeah, […]
Business Minute 23 - Destroy Your Comfort Zone - FileMaker Pro Gurus: [...] Make a PDF Table of Contents – FileMaker [...]