Six Fried Rice

Advanced Techniques

Not of the faint of heart, these posts talk about advanced (and oh-so-cool) FileMaker Pro tips and techniques.

• FileMaker Dictionary Functions

  9-20-2007 by Jesse Antunes

  Since many people were impressed with my named parameters article, I decided to write up another post about the dictionary functions. Actually in all fairness I think three people actually liked it. Vincenzo Menanno, Chris Wack and Sam Barnum this post’s for you!

• Importing Records to a Backup – Brute Force

  9-13-2007 by Jesse Antunes

  Your FileMaker Server loses power. All your files have crashed. What do you do now? The safest practice is to go to a backup. Sure, this sounds like a daunting task, but it is surprisingly manageable. The best part is that you won’t lose any sleep worrying about how long [...]

• Limiting Checkbox and Radio Button Choices

  9-5-2007 by Geoff Coffey

  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 [...]

• Dealing with Damaged FileMaker Files

  8-9-2007 by Jesse Antunes

  One of the most asked questions about FileMaker is how to deal with damaged files. There is a glut of choices when attacking this problem and there doesn’t seem to be one single answer. Compact, Optimize or Recover… Maybe Save as Clone which one works and why? Hopefully, this will answer a [...]

• Stored Calculations and FileMaker Plug-ins

  7-31-2007 by Jesse Antunes

  FileMaker Server does some funny things when you create a stored calculation that uses a plug-in. In fact, odds are you received everyone’s favorite invalid character, the ?. This article explains why this occurs and gives some solutions for this rather pesky problem.

• Automate FileMaker Plug-in Deployment with AutoUpdate

  7-31-2007 by Geoff Coffey

  Back in the late 19th century, when FileMaker Server 5.5 was released, one of its stellar new features was AutoUpdate. FileMaker Server can automatically install plug-ins on the connecting FileMaker Pro clients as needed. This is very cool, but there are a few gotchas, which are explained here.

• Custom Page Numbers in PDFs and Printed Reports

  7-18-2007 by Geoff Coffey

  In FileMaker 9 Tip #6 we explained how to use the new Append to PDF feature in FileMaker 9. With it, you can build up a PDF file over many steps in a script, to produce a much more complex and data-rich PDF than was ever possible before. One of our readers, Norman Foster, asked [...]

• Deleting Duplicate Records in FileMaker

  7-13-2007 by Jesse Antunes

  Duplicate data always seems to creep it’s way into your system no matter how hard you try. Unfortunately, in FileMaker there is no easy way to deal with junk. Or is there?

• Passing Multiple Parameters to Scripts – Advanced

  7-12-2007 by Jesse Antunes

  Wouldn’t it be nice if whenever you need a parameter you could just ask for it by name? Lets say that you have a create order script and you want to pass the script the name, street and zip code of the customer. If you were stuck with just the regular old FileMaker [...]

• FileMaker 9 Tip#9: Web Viewers without the Web

  7-12-2007 by Geoff Coffey

  Another day, another awesome new FileMaker 9 feature. Today’s special: so called data URLs. In a nutshell, you don’t need a web site to use web viewers anymore. Now they can easily (read: without crazy exports and obscene path hacks) show data pulled right from the FileMaker database itself. This is, like, way cooler than [...]