Geoff Coffey Many of you may not know that in order to be accepted as a speaker at the FileMaker Developers Conference, you have to submit a “speaker demo,” which is a short self-made video of yourself presenting some topic.
I had to do this for the first time last year, and my demo video was a bit of a hit among my Phoenix FileMaker friends. I wasn’t accepted as a speaker in 2007, so maybe the powers that be didn’t think I had exactly the right idea.
An interesting question popped up on the TechNet discussion list this evening:
>I have a list of records with dates, which often repeat from one record to the next. I want all the same dates to be one colour. Then the next date would be another color. The background color of the date field would alternate from one color to the other as the date changes.
I’ve never run in to this need before, but it sounds like something that would come in handy. It also proves to be just enough FileMaker challenge to be interesting. Here’s how to make it work.
FileMaker’s `Save Records as PDF` script step is, like, totally awesome. But there’s one teeny tiny issue: it sure likes to crash. We use this feature *a lot* with our customers, and under the right set of circumstances, we can see crashing on half or more of the machines our scripts run on. Luckily, it turns out this problem is easy to fix. It is such a frequent problem that I thought I’d save the googlers of the world some time and write up the solution here.
> Out of Date: If you’re using FileMaker Pro 10 or later, you can accomplish the goal in this article more easily using script triggers. See [this newer article](http://sixfriedrice.com/wp/script-triggers-monitoring-and-restoring-tabs/) for details.
If you use Tab Controls a lot (and don’t we all?) then you may have run into a little snag: When you switch to a different layout, then come back again, the default tab panel comes back to the front. This is usually not a big deal. But sometimes you have a script that switches layouts just for a moment. When this script runs, the user never sees the layout change, but they *do* see the tab control mysteriously bounce back to its home base. This article shows you how to fix this problem once-and-for-all.
Many people were surprised by Tuesday’s announcement from FileMaker Inc.: A new “desktop database” application called [Bento](http://bentotrial.com). Nobody I know had any idea this was in the works, and I’m pretty sure it is the first product from FMI that is not directly FileMaker Pro related since Claris Organizer was released back in 1827 or thereabouts. For a FileMaker announcement, Bento is getting [a](http://www.macworld.com/2007/11/firstlooks/bento/index.php) [lot](http://daringfireball.net/2007/11/bento) [of](http://macintouch.com/#prod.2007.11.13.bnt) [coverage](http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/11/13/first_look_filemakers_bento_personal_database_for_leopard.html) in the Mac media. Here’s our take.
There’s a lively discussion on the [TechNet](http://filemaker.com/technet/) mailing list right now about the pros and cons of FileMaker Pro’s *Object Grids* feature. This is certainly an opinionated discussion, and there is clearly no “right” way. A lot of people find Object Grids *annoying* because it makes it *harder* to line things up sometimes. Here’s a quick tip to help get Object Grids to behave themselves. I love Object Grids, and leave them on almost all the time, but I don’t think I’d feel this way without the little trick explained here.
This is a quickie: If you were using the beta release of the PHP API for FileMaker, there are some things you should know.
Today’s Find mode article is short-and-sweet. If you ever feel it would be easier to tell FileMaker what you *don’t* want it to find, the Omit checkbox is your friend. In fact, you can use this esoteric Find mode widget to create incredibly complex queries that target exactly what you want.
Did you know that if you shift-click on a field formatted as radio buttons, you can select more than one choice? Even if *you* don’t know this, chances are some day some *user* will figure it out. Yuck. Here’s a short-but-sweet technique to deal with the problem. And you’ll see how to apply the same concept to do some cool stuff.
If you have a relational database (one with several connected tables) and you do any scripting at all, you’ll almost certainly ask yourself a question at some point: How can I tell if the record I’m on has related records? This article explains the scenarios you may run in to, and how *best* to deal with them.