Pause on Error 2016 - Cleveland

I wrote this from Detroit last week, returning home to Seattle after the Pause On Error conference in Cleveland earlier in the week. I enjoyed my stay in Cleveland; it’s an interesting city architecturally.

The Pause On Error conference is a FileMaker developer’s conference on a smaller scale than FileMaker’s annual Devcon (in Las Vegas this year). It gives you a nice opportunity to more easily meet people and the sessions tend to be less formal. You get some interesting speakers that I don’t think you would ever see at the much bigger Devcon event.

One of my coworkers at Portage Bay, Xandon Frogett, also attended and these are four sessions that stood out for us:

FM Server panel discussion
I didn’t learn a great deal new in this session, but it was a really good opportunity to hear about issues and resolutions that other people have with FileMaker Server, and what other people think about the upcoming change in FileMaker’s licensing that will eliminate shared hosting as a hosting option.

WAN Connections
Many people use FileMaker over the internet these days and so this session on optimizing FileMaker for use over wide area networks was quite interesting. Design choices can make a huge difference on how fast your application performs over the internet, without necessarily changing what the end user sees at all.

Selector-Connector
Jonathan Fletcher held a round table on Selector Connector. The big takeaway for me on this one was his technique for flattening the anchor buoy down to a first order reference for all table occurrences. It required using UUID’s so that all records across the solution would have a unique id. With all table occurrences related directly to the Selector’s global field joins, you could create modular portal viewers that could be placed anywhere to display any table records by simply changing the global. Pretty cool.

Auditing
This session was unique in that Vince Menanno presented a different process where he utilizes global fields in a popover for editing records. The technique would then concatenate and hash the values for a comparison against the current values. Only if there was a change would he then send those changes to run a script on server via script parameter. The script on server would add them to an audit log and make the changes. While this technique did have a bit of overhead to set up, it allowed for total control over changes and worked well with previous techniques Vince has held sessions on. One of those was a session at Devcon 2015 about Localization and Multiple Languages.

If you’d like to read more about any of these sessions, the conference Wiki is available online. 
~John Newhoff

Google Maps Integration into FileMaker

Since the addition of the web viewer to FileMaker, we have been able to use JavaScript to personalize aspects of the user interface that couldn't be done before. One of these boons comes in the form of the Google Maps API. By utilizing Google maps and loading it with data from FileMaker, we can display customized map info. While incorporating address information to render markers on Google maps is fairly common these days, we have made some additional strides in working with the common Google api and are able to leverage some useful but obscure API services.

The first one of these exciting services, often overlooked, is clustering. Clustering provides a way to manage a scenario where you have too many markers. It provides a grouping technique for several markers to display as a single marker. This has many uses, one of which is to help you navigate quickly into the region you need to look at, without accidentally clicking on the wrong marker. That is a big one when you are working on a mobile device. Trying to click on just one marker in a sea of markers is difficult. You find yourself pinch zooming in awkward ways, trying to zoom in enough - to separate the markers enough - to get a clean click area. With the cluster, you will automatically be zoomed into the area by touching the cluster and can then drill down quickly to the single marker you seek.

The second of these services is a bit more common. It is the ability to add color to the markers. The ability to show all of your customers on a single map is great. When you are able to color-code them, you can truly explore your data. Having a different colored marker for varying sets of data becomes useful when you can adjust it easily. You might want to show the sales rep associated with a customer or mark the perspective value of customers in different colors. This is where refining the UI comes in to play even more.

In order for colors to help differentiate your data, it is necessary to have both a legend of the color's meaning and the ability to select which items in the list to display. We have been able to use a combination of the FileMaker button bar and a JavaScript color picker to provide elements that make working with your data a lot easier. Teaming up these elements makes working with a large plot of color-coded pins much easier.

 
(Additional resources.)
~Xandon Frogget 

Congrats, Kate!

Once again, Kate has led the way in getting certified in the newest version of FileMaker. She is now a certified v14 developer, having passed her test just the other day. Congratulations, Kate, and good luck to John, Joe, and Xandon when they take their turns!

Removing White Space From Text Fields

Removing white space in text fields is nothing new for FileMaker, but removing extra space before carriage returns ( “¶” for short ) from a delimited list, requires a little bit more than the simple trim function that is provided in FileMaker.

The trim function in FileMaker will remove unneeded spaces at the beginning and end of a text string. This is very helpful for a single line of text. It will take a line of text like
" Bob " and turn it into "Bob".

Unfortunately when you have several lines of text that are delimited by a ¶ character as in the following example, you will need something else.

example:

"Allison¶
Bob ¶
Charlie¶
Doug"

If you want to make sure none of the lines have an extra space at the end like the second line "Bob ¶", a simple trim will not work.

This is where the substitute function can come in handy. 

Substitute(text;searchString;replaceString)

The Substitute Function will search for a character or string and replace it with whatever character or string you choose. With this you can take a text field like the example above and use the substitute function to replace the occurrences of " ¶" with a single "¶".

 Substitute ( example ; " ¶" ; "¶" );
(notice there is a space before the ¶ in the searchString)

This will provide you with the corrected:

"Allison¶
Bob¶
Charlie¶
Doug"

You can apply the same substitute several times to remove multiple spaces, and when mixed with the trim function, it can really help clean up text and lists.

Substitute is one of my favorite functions for working with text. If you haven't used it before, give it a try and see if it can't help remove unwanted white space.

 -Xandon

Modular FileMaker

FileMaker Pro does not lend itself to modular development practices as easily as some other programming environments, such as Java, Javascript, or C, but we are still very fortunate to have a community-wide development effort towards a library of re-usable code modules at http://www.modularfilemaker.org.

We recently had to update a database for a client to synchronize with Google Contacts using Open Authentication 2.0, and were able to take advantage of an OAuth module uploaded by Jim Randell to save ourselves and our clients a significant amount of development effort.

In our weekly development meeting this morning, we reviewed another new module posted last month. It's a FileMaker WebDirect module that allows for the creation of PDFs, a function not directly supported by WebDirect. I think this is going to be a module we’ll use to enable better reporting functionality in solutions we publish to the web via WebDirect.

If you haven’t looked into Modular FileMaker, you should check it out!
~John Newhoff