FMPug Meeting Jan 26, 2009 - LIVE
Top 10 Features of FileMaker Pro 10. Alexi’s introduction is speaking out to about 30 individuals.
John thanks everyone for being here. Space provided by Shannon Butler @ GroupHealth.
Alexi introduces herself as a FileMaker SE
Alexi is giving away a copy of FileMaker Advanced.
Showing the status area from FileMaker, going back to the 80’s. The new status toolbar is located at the top of the screen. And no you can’t move to the side.
Lets talk about Dynamic Reports. Sorting is still required, but adds additional options. The old version, you must be in preview mode. Can’t really interact with your data. Live sub summary data. The other cool thing is persistent finds. Even if you edit records. It can have caveats.
Script Triggers. We’ve been asking for it for 15 years. It’s great, but be careful. It can backfire if used improperly. If you know how to write a script then you can make a script trigger. Previous to 10 you can have buttons, scripts, custom menus. Issues with order. Entry vs. Script.
Two main kinds of triggers. Layout based triggers. For instance a script can run once a user goes to a layout. You can sort data once they enter a layout. Instant meaning in life. There are 5 layout types of script triggers. The second kind. On enter, exit, modify, save. For instance, user tabs out of a field. You can also control the mode. You can do it browse, find, edit, preview. Most can function in these modes. The object based ones can be triggered in browse and find. Can run a find on field exit. So you can specify in find only.
Saved finds. Less work for the developer and for the user. Canned finds are a thing of the past.
Send mail via SMTP: your can send mail through FileMaker. Phill and Alexi call it SPAMMaker Pro!!! The old way required a lot of local user interaction. A local email client, email account.
You can bypass the user account and email client with this feature. Send mail is now FIleMaker Server Compatible!!!!! Cheers anyone!
File Recovery Improvements. They haven’t marketed the new ability to recover a file. There have been significant improvements to the recovery features. Recover before 10, it’s potentially destructive. Clone and copy compressed are safe. The recover looks at every 4 byte chunk of data and if it found something wrong, it would kill it. The end dialog box of records skipped. The last issue is all or nothing.
Enter 10. Fixed all 3 of these. The new advanced recover option. There ARE options! Recover now generates a very verbose log file. The more info you have, the better you are. If there are differences in the log file, you have a much better chance to find out what’s wrong.
Jason Young asks if he can paste the contents of a script into a recovery script. You can try. Just check the log file after.
All other options required file to be open with previous versions. Now the first to radio buttons can do it when a file won’t open.
ESS enhancements. Still supporting the same basic platforms. They have been updated to the latest versions for support. But there are two new features. Single sign on on the windows side for mssql. And SQL data as value lists. This is a huge feature!
On Mac side the new version of Excel XSLX (I beleive).
Import Bento sources. Bento can be used as a backdoor. It connects directly to Addressbook and iCal.
Alexi opens demo app. Everything you know about showing and hiding the status tool bar still applys. A new interesting wrinkle. The status bar can be customized: Its application based not solution based. You can not programatically control the size or where it shows up. The drag and drop setup looks like a modern apps tool bar.
May need to instruct users on setup of toolbars if you still use them.
One thing custom menus allows you to do is Hijack menu items. you can rename them, remove them, or run a script.
With custom menus, if you HiJack a command, it will include a script. But you have to understand a setup part. Also if a customer knows how to add items, they can change functionality. But that doesn’t break security.
New button for saved finds. If you add too many buttons in the status bar you get the more options arrows.
New wider layouts menu. You can see what you’re looking for. It also truncates in the middle if it’s too long.
Pizza break!!!
In find mode there are now magnifying glasses in the fields. The pie feature next to the record count, shows found set and omitted. Cool new features!
Showing the live sub summaries.
See that browse is the showing mode. If you change some of the data or add a new record it resorts automatically. Live sub summary is so awesome!
Showing the details of the layout, looks the same as previous.
Showing some of the details of the layout objects. You can apply multiple script triggers to objects. This is where the caveats come in. Now showing the on layout load script trigger. You also can add onlayout keystroke. You can capture key strokes. There is an on record load as well.
A little red firecraker in the bottom right of the field indicates an object based script trigger.
Object script triggers can cause issues if over used or used improperly. You can fire a script on modify. But becareful! Same thing between on object exit and save. You can enter a field without changing anything and the on exit would trigger but the on save would not.
There is a white paper on script triggers available to TechNet members. Really great resource!
A new script step. Install on timmer. You know a script can run another script from within. The scripts fire syncronisly. Now you can fire a script at a certain time. It sets a timer for the script to launch. If a user gets to a records and locks it, you could set a 10 minute timer to commit the record. That is a sweet feature.
Script timer can be cancelled by closing the window it was launched on. The script timer is attached to a certain window.
Alexi is showing more examples with script triggers. She is doing a session at this years devcon on that and recovery.
She is showing the auto sorting with sub summaries and script triggers. It is a very fast in doing this.
Show examples of on keystroke. Shift and arrow is incrementing days, Ctrl and arrow was changing month.
The on keystroke will change the way you build UI in FileMaker!
Another example is a record change undo function. Imagine what you could do with that!
Watch out on setting Key stroke triggers. They will override the OS or Application keystrokes!
This can do error checking or related record creation on the fly.
Alexi is showing the recover command.
There is a new consistancy check. FileMaker 9 will automatically check consistancy the first time it is opened on 9 server. Other than that if the file crashes 9 server will check the consistancy. The only other way in 9 to force a consistancy check is to do a backup. If those fail then there is a good chance it is corrupt.
In 10, if you recover a file, there is an advanced view for recovery options. There could be an issue with a default start layout or script. Using an option in 10 recovery you can bypass them to help getting into the files if they are corrupt. You do need the admin password to preform this task.
There is a rebuild field index. No more individual field index rebuilds. No more hours spent rebuilding indicies. There is an option to rebuild all indicies with in a file.
There is a now and later option as well. There may be confusion on this. If you choose now, any field that had an index, when you did the recover, will have its index wiped and rebuilt. If you choose later, it reverts in the default “index when needed”. This could decrease size of files and may want to be run as a regular maintenance.
There is also a script and layout rebuilder. You may use this if you find you can’t reorder scripts. That is a sign that the script catelog has issues. You can run just that option.
Saved finds has two options. FileMaker watches what the user does with finds. It’s a per user setting. It’s stored with the users security settings.
If a user has finds they do a lot, they can save the find. One nice thing of this feature is that it can scale with the finds.
It saves the name by the criteria the user used. There is a dialog box that to name it. There is an advanced option which looks identical to the find in scriptmaker. The criteria, fields, operators are available to the user. You can Hijack the command with a script to hide features.
You can pre-populate a file with saved finds. Open it locally and save the finds. It’s like global fields.
Questions.
Printers are now saved. FileMaker marketing says it’s a feature, Alexi say’s it should have been a bug fix!
The history of the default script step. In the beginning it was put in to show people what would go into a scriptmaker dialog. Developers hated it. They took it away and now put in an option.
You can’t change the default script script steps.
Next Speaker.
Jason Young with SolutionMakers is going to present on conditional formatting.
Jason was inspired on this solution by Chris Ippolite’s last demo. Jason shows a progress bar using no container fields, graphics. Now he is bar graphs with no containers or graphics.
Jason sets up a single calc field with 100 reps. What we are going to do is use get calculation repeating field. Conditional formating is the magic behind these tricks.
Jason shows a let statement, getting record and field properties. Getting found count and where he is in that found count.
It is completely schema independant. This will be posted for download on the blog.
Jason is showing a bar chart with 1700 records behind it. There is a small pause but it shows very nicely.
