BillOnFileMaker

Command drag in layout should be reserved for selection

Bill Doerrfeld — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 16:04:36 +0000

Designing complex layouts containing dozens of objects crammed into a small amount of space can be a huge challenge developing in FileMaker Pro. Lacking support for layers or an object tree where it’s possible to visualize and select groups of objects or individual objects within groups—there are various tricks and workarounds one must master using FileMaker. One “trick” involves command-dragging (on Mac) over a selection of objects to select them. As long as the object falls anywhere within the drag selection it gets selected. Without holding the command key only objects fully contained within the drag area get selected. Great. This is very useful. However, when you have layers of objects piled on top of one another, selecting specific groups of objects becomes a chore.

One common safeguard and practice is to lock objects you don’t want to operate on then you can more easily command-drag-select all objects on top or below the locked objects. However, if the underlying object is not locked and you command-drag in an attempt to select objects, you end up actually moving the object first command-clicked onto.

What would be helpful is if command-select-drag ONLY functioned to select a range of objects. Command clicking on an object (as in the starting point of a drag especially if the underlying object is a large background or portal) would not move the object when attempting to drag select.

Bug: Can’t reference go to layout via calculation if layout name is also name of a folder

Bill Doerrfeld — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 20:35:49 +0000

After spending a good portion of today trying to figure out why my script to navigate to a layout was not working for a particular new layout, I was able to narrow the issue down to what I consider a nasty bug in FileMaker Pro 11.0v2 (I haven’t tested with 11.0v1 but I see no reason why it wouldn’t also exist there). In short, be careful to not have any layout folder names that are similar to layout names as FileMaker will get confused and fail to access the designated layout when its name is placed within a Go To Layout Via Calculation script step.

The following video demonstrates the problem.

Web Viewer and Me.com

Bill Doerrfeld — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 15:03:42 +0000

Try going to Apple’s me.com within a FileMaker Pro Web Viewer and you are warned that your browser is not supported. While many routines actually work, some don’t such as trying to compose an email. Clicking on the compose email icon takes one to the default OS browser for re-authentication.

I fully understand Web Viewer is not a Web browser, but, it would be nice if in terms of Web page rendering that it behaved like its underlying engine (which on Mac is WebKit). The only apparent way to discover what does and doesn’t work is experimentation as there’s no listing of what Webkit features are or are not supported. There’s a lot of sites out there…

Window status icons grayed out when within field with calendar popup and dropdowns in v11, okay in v10

Bill Doerrfeld — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 17:13:09 +0000

The Close, Maximize and Minimize window control buttons get grayed out when within a FileMaker Pro v11 field which contains a calendar or drop-down menu control. This is changed behavior vs pre-11 FileMaker. For users relying on the presence of active window controls to clearly denote which window has the current focus, this issue can represent usability problems.

The following videos present the issue.

V10 Window Controls

v11 Window Controls

Find any text across all of your scripts; for free

Bill Doerrfeld — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 15:49:21 +0000

The inability to search within your scripts to locate code is a major omission in FileMaker. I know of no other programming environment where the developer can’t search for his/her code! The good news is there’s a fast, free and easy workaround. Namely, print your scripts to PDF then do the search there.

To build the PDF go into Manage Scripts and select all scripts (Command-A on Mac). Then simply print these scripts as a PDF.

I use this technique all the time to quickly locate fields, variables, comments and code routines, especially before contemplating making schema changes. Thanks to Jason Young for turning me on to this over a year ago. It’s a huge time-saver for which I can’t do without.

“Arrange By” setting in Import Records script step not retained on Copy; use Duplicate instead

Bill Doerrfeld — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 13:40:43 +0000

I was just engaged in a lengthy operation of copying/duplicating a number of Import Records script steps (so they could be edited) in FileMaker Pro Advanced v11 and realized that the “Arrange By” setting was not being retained when the Import Records script step is copied and pasted but IS retained when the script step is duplicated. An odd inconsistency. In my case “Arrange By” was set to “matching records” but after copy/paste the script step setting was changed to “last order”. To ensure all settings are retained, it appears the safest practice is to always duplicate a script step vs copy/paste. The one downside is that with copy/paste you can paste the steps at a specific location whereas duplicate simply inserts the step right below the duped step. I haven’t tested to notice whether this behaviour occurs with other script steps.

Be careful not to execute a Quick Find in table view with lots of fields

Bill Doerrfeld — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 14:11:16 +0000

I recently noticed my scripted Quick Find wasn’t finding all matching records. Digging around I discovered that the offscreen window containing all the fields to search was coming up in table view and for some reason while all fields were placed on the layout, they were not all showing in table view (there were a LOT of fields) and consequently were not making their way into the Quick Find search. (Maybe there’s a limit on the number of fields that can display in table view?)

The remedy was simply to add a View As Form script step to ensure the layout always loads in Form view (even if I may have previously viewed it manually in Table view).

Show script mod time in Manage Scripts

Bill Doerrfeld — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 20:46:23 +0000

Manage Scripts should show and allow sorting based on the modification timestamp of scripts. This would dramatically simplify the process of indentifying recently worked on scripts especially in cases where hundreds of scripts are maintained and the developer goes in and out of many scripts quickly to perform edits.

Workaround to get Quick Find found set to return no records if no records are found

Bill Doerrfeld — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 19:10:30 +0000

The new Quick Find feature in FileMaker v11 is great in that you can use it to quickly find text in any field across all related tables. Just simply place all the fields you want included in said find on a single layout and ensure that Quick Find is enabled for that layout (it’s enabled by default). When using this feature within a script it operates differently than a “standard” find request when the find yields no match.

Here’s what the error dialog looks like in a standard find request with no match.

Here’s what it looks like after a Quick Find yielding no match.

The fact that the dialogs look differently isn’t much of an issue at least for me as I trap for errors and display my own dialogs. However, the functionality is different in that if you’re scripting your find and desire to show 0 records found on your layout, you need to handle things differently with a scripted Quick Find vs a Standard Find. The standard find with Set Error Capture enabled will properly return 0 records which then allows you to determine this via Get ( FoundCount ) and then properly display the number of returned records. Not so with a Quick Find. It returns the previously found set which means you can’t get the actual count via Get ( FoundCount ) or even Get ( LastError ) = 401 to determine if nothing was found.

The following workaround in your script allows you to determine whether or not 0 records were found via a Quick Find.

As I struggled with this a bit before coming up with the workaround I hope this helps someone else.

Activate pop-up menu via script or via tab into field

Bill Doerrfeld — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 18:35:54 +0000

FileMaker Pro needs the ability to tab into a field (or go to via script) and select/activate a pop-up menu (NOT a drop-down menu, a pop-up menu).

To be crystal clear I’m referring to activating the built-in FMP pop-up menus. I’ve contemplated various workarounds. One kludgy one being using the 24U Virtual User plugin and having it instigate a mouse click at the correct position in the current window where the pop-up exists. However, tracking dozens of pop-ups across dozens of windows all positioned in various user controlled areas of the screen (e.g. drag and window here or there) was just too much to deal with (I endure lots of pain, but, not that much).

Another alternative is to use ScriptMaker and its Java menus which you can tab into or activate via a script. I futzed around with ScriptMaker and its Java menus for a bit about a year and half ago. For a while I was contemplating using SM JUST for the ability to tab into pop-ups AND do type-ahead within pop-ups. However, the partial list of reasons for not going that way are as follows:

1) Type-ahead in pop-ups is now provided in FMP v11 (thank you FMI)
2) SM Java menus are slow and klunky and the look and feel doesn’t match the rest of my FMP-based design (inquiries on how to customize the pop-ups went unmet and/or it’s too kludgy to mess with)
3) Overhead of SM just for this functionality seemed excessive and unnecessary

I’m not sure if the FileMaker plugin API would allow a 3rd party developer to provide said functionality. But, regardless, I’d really like to see it built-in. With type-ahead within pop-ups in FileMaker v11 it only makes sense to allow access to the pop-up via the keyboard.