Dallas Meeting - Mar. 6

The Dallas members enjoyed some good barbeque and FileMaker stuff at the March 6th meeting.  After Kirk went over the schedule for the next few months, he turned the meeting over to Taylor Sharpe.

Taylor brought a presentation on the concept of Web Scraping.  It was very interesting in that you transfer the underlying html source code from a web page into a field in your FM solution and then use it in whatever way you desire.  Particularly useful when you regularly look up information from a web page and until now you have been copying and pasting or re-typing the data.  Thats old school.  Web Scraping is new school!

Thank you Taylor for introducing is to web scraping.  I’m sure everyone is now thinking of an example in their solution to apply this technique to.

Dallas Meeting - Feb. 6

We met at the Parr Public Library in Plano, TX this morning to go over some of the new features of FileMaker Pro 10.  Of course, everyone is already aware of most of the new features, but it is very helpful to see examples and be able to ask questions as you explore them.

There were about 24 developers of various types in attendance, representing a wide range of industries.  Kirk Bowman opened the meeting by thanking everyone for being there and talked a little about future meetings.  It looks like the Dallas Chapter has a monthly meeting set up at least through July of this year.

Our guest, FileMaker engineer Rosemary Tietge, passed out her business card, while Kirk passed out FMPug forms.  Rosemary took a moment to talk about FM representatives and their territories and responsibilities and asked for the developers to introduce themselves.  She then jumped right into her presentation with some sample files for all to see on the big screen.  Here are some highlights of the various features that were talked about in depth:

*The new toolbar is more contextual in that it puts handy icons in front of you depending on the mode you are in.

*Saved finds are per solution and are connected to the user account.  If you open the solution at a new location with your user account, the saved finds will follow you.

*Live summaries, which maintain their sort order when a record is modified also work if you change found sets.  That is - if you do a find, the new set of records is also sorted in the same order.

* The pie chart toggles between the found set and the omitted set

*The enhanced table view.  What you see now in table view can be modified per user.  Developers will want to pay more attention to field access now because users have more control over which fields they see in table view.  Simply removing a field from a layout isn’t restrictive enough.  Table view seems to be more usable, and once your users see the table view button on the toolbar and begin using it, they will find themselves using it more often.  You need to try out table view.

* Script triggers took up most of our time.  Rosemary commented that developers had been saying for years “I want to run a script when I exit a field”.  Script triggers do this and so much more.  7 Script Triggers are layout based, 5 are object based, and 1 is a timer feature on a window.  Rosemary showed several examples of how script triggers may be used, and I’m sure all of the developers in the room were immediately dreaming of how each of these examples could be applied to their own solutions.  She also pointed Technet members to a very good white paper on script triggers by Steve Romig. The discussion on script triggering is too complex to try and discuss here, but you will definitely want to explore script triggers.  One comment was “They are powerful, but dangerous”, to which Rosemary added, “We have given you a lot of rope”.  I think developers love rope.

* Set Tab Order - how often have you added a new field and wanted to insert it in the middle of the tab order?  One click does it now and the rest of the fields adjust automatically.

*Send Mail using smtp - Can be a very efficient way of sending notices

There were lots of questions and answers back and forth during the presentation, each one being general enough that all of the developers benefitted from the answer.    Rosemary did comment that if we will use the “Send us your feedback” function under the help menu that these actually are looked at by product managers.

After the presentation, Kirk held the drawing for FMPug members and the copy of FMP10 Advanced.  The prize was won by Tony Borino.

Thank you, Rosemary for coming to share with us.  The next meeting is on Friday, March 6th.