More than once I got a phone call from my clients with a cry for help: “Yesterday I entered a lot of data, but today everything is gone! I do not know what happened.”

Of course I tried to recreate the situation in my database but fail. All the data I entered was there. Next I visited the client and he showed me how he entered the data. Only this time everything was saved in the table, no data loss at all. Without any clue what happened I had to drive home. A couple days later I received a similar phone call and I tried again my best to find the source of the problem.

It was just by chance that I found out what happened. From a distance I watched the user doing his daily work. He was updating some address records on the database. At one point he entered Find mode to search for a customer. He looked into his handwritten notes for the right spelling of the customer name and realized that this must be a new customer. He entered the customer name, address and contact data. Then he added a new record and typed in another new customer.

At that time I realized, the user was not aware that he entered the data in Find mode. He totally forgot that he had switch to that mode and never returned to Browse mode. So all the data he entered were used for a search request and got lost when he closed the database. And that was exactly what had happened before. He had entered the now missing data at the end of the day. In the rush to leave the office he forgot about a switch into Find mode, entered all the data and closed the database without realizing that the data was never saved to a table.

The Problem

FileMaker offers by default only few indicators about the current mode. For the Find mode these indicators are:

• Find mode specific toolbar
  
  
   
• Find symbol (gray magnifier symbol) in search fields
  
  
   
• Find mode indicator in status bar at the bottom of the layout
  
  
   

But these indicators might be not visible. For example, the Status Toolbar might be turned off for the current window and the gray magnifier symbol is only visible when the Layout Setup option “Show field frames when record is active” is checked on. Even then is the magnifier symbol only visible if a field is activated. But it is not displayed in the active field, only in all other fields enabled for find mode. And finally, the mode indicator in the status bar is so small and usually far away from the focus of the user, that almost no user has ever recognized it.

In bad circumstances it might (and will) happen that the user thinks he is in browse mode when actual the find mode is activated. Any data entered now is only placed into a search request and is not saved into the table. Read more …

Last week I wrote a new version of my custom function FrontTabs. The function retrieves the object names of all open tabs. Another developer discovered an error in the previous version. With three or more nested tab controls the function could return a wrong result. It was time to rewrite the function. The new version takes care of that problem.

The function FrontTabs returns a list with all currently open tabs, so called front tabs. Of course, all tabs must have an object name. The returned object names are listed in the order of the nested tab controls, starting with the utmost tab control. This makes it easy to recreate a previous saved front tabs status. Read more …

A couple days ago I received a package from April L’Assange. She is (in her own words) “currently not working for FileMaker Inc.”, but she had something I might be interested in. In the package I found a DVD with screenshots, sample files and a program, supposedly FileMaker 12 in alpha status. The files I saw were really exciting. Some of the things I found are described here. I might add more soon.

New File Format

First the bad news. I could not open the sample files (extension fpc) with my current FileMaker version. It looks like the file format will change with the new version; understandable with all the new features that were added to the program.

On the other side I was able to open fp7 files. A dialog popped up, asking my if I like to convert the file. Press OK and the database will be converted into a fpc file.

Manage Database

Developer Access

Before FileMaker 12 you had to go to the actual file to manage the fields and tables in this file. Now you can manage the database from all related FileMaker files as long as they are defined as external data sources and you have full access to the current and the related files.

This saves a lot of time when you manage bigger projects, especially when you try to separate data from layouts.

Table Comment

A minor new feature are table comments. You can add a comment to your table (similar to comments for fields), allowing better documentation of your database.

Field Alias

Each field may have an alias. There are different reasons why and when to use an alias. For example:

• The alias is used as the field label when the field is added to an layout. Without an alias the original field name is used.
• In import/export and sort dialogs you may use alias instead of field names. In case you use cryptic field names with pre- suffixes (_uc_TestSample_limit_n) alias are a great help. The common user will see a more readable name like “Sample Qty” and, if exported into Excel, the column will have the same name.

In privilege sets you can set the option whether field names, aliases, or both are accessible. This will definitely help an inexperienced user to select the right field in the sort dialog.

Read more …

Working with Fonts

In the last few days I worked on my template database again. I use it as a storage place and work of reference of ideas, features, and solutions I developed with FileMaker. It includes a basic collection of custom functions, default scripts for trigger management, and design samples.

Designing a good looking layout is a challenge in itself. But when you try to use the same layout in both worlds, Mac OS and MS Windows, raises the challenge quite a bit. Main problems are the font. There are only few fonts available in both systems. But having the same name does not make it the same font. Text formatted in the same font might have different width and height – resulting in really ugly layouts.

There are different ways to redress these problems:

• Oversize all labels and fields
• Use conditional formatting
• Use hidden tab controls for each operating system
• Create separate layouts for each operating system

Often, you will use a mixture of different solutions. But to master these challenges you should know a little bit about the fonts in Mac OS and MS Windows.
Read more …

A portal is a window to a related table. When you create a portal, you define the related table and the number of rows to be shown. Besides some other options you can also decide, whether the portal shall have a vertical scroll bar. Unfortunately FileMaker does not offer a direct way to change this option during run-time.

The size of the portal – and therefore the number of rows – may change at run-time. This will happen when you set vertical autosize option for the portal. Changing the height of the layout window will also change the size of the portal. There is no FileMaker function to get the number of actual visible portal rows. Even with such a function, you can not turn off the scroll bar when fewer records are shown in the portal.

To overcome this problem, I wrote two custom functions. These functions and a invisible object create an effect that will hide the portal scroll bar when fewer records than available portal rows are shown.

Read more …