Six Fried Rice

Alternating Color Based on Alternating Data

Geoff Coffey — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 06:49:01 +0000

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.

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Fixing FileMaker PDF Crashes on Mac OS X

Geoff Coffey — Wed, 07 May 2008 22:08:58 +0000

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.

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Comparing Dates in FileMaker

Jesse Antunes — Wed, 07 May 2008 16:56:14 +0000

Comparing dates can be confusing. It’s tough to tell exactly when FileMaker will treat the values that you are trying to compare as dates or as numbers or as…something else. Hopefully, I can point you in the right direction. (more…)

Duplicating a Set of Records in FileMaker

Jesse Antunes — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 03:47:59 +0000

Duplicating in a Record in FileMaker is very easy…. but a found set???? That takes a little bit of thought. Here is how I would approach the task.

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Restoring Active Tab State

Geoff Coffey — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 22:57:39 +0000

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.

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FileMaker Gets Bento

Geoff Coffey — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 06:29:23 +0000

Many people were surprised by Tuesday’s announcement from FileMaker Inc.: A new “desktop database” application called Bento. 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 lot of coverage in the Mac media. Here’s our take.

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Tab Controls without the Tabs

Jesse Antunes — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 23:44:26 +0000

Tab controls have added a wealth of options to FileMaker developers looking to better organize and present data to their clients. The only limitation is that the tabs could only be placed on the top of the tab controls isn’t always ideal. FileMaker 9 provides a much more powerful and interesting way of controlling your tabs. (more…)

Highlighting the Active Field in FileMaker

Jesse Antunes — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 01:59:55 +0000

One of the common complaints our customers have is that they can’t tell which field they are in when using FileMaker. Before FileMaker 9, there was no way to fix this for them. With the addition of conditional formatting, not only can you highlight the active field but you can make it bold, a different color or perhaps even enlarge the font. (more…)

Making FileMaker Object Grids Behave

Geoff Coffey — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 19:02:21 +0000

There’s a lively discussion on the 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.

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Migrating from the Beta FileMaker PHP API

Geoff Coffey — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 21:25:38 +0000

This is a quickie: If you were using the beta release of the PHP API for FileMaker, there are some things you should know.

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