DevCon 2009

Well if you are wondering where the new articles are, I can tell you that they’re coming very soon. The last couple of months has been hectic leading up to Devcon 2009. I also took 2 weeks off before devcon to do some cycling in Oregon & California. Devcon was a great experience. Here are some early pics, more to come soon…

Building a Tidy Database – An Overview

In this new series of articles, I am going to explain all the methods I use to help maintain a tidy and manageable database. As the size of a database grows, it can be very easy to fall into complacency, and become slack in areas such as naming conventions. I will give some tips on how to avoid this and keep your database spick and span

Join my Table? – Part Three

In Part Two, I demonstrated how to implement the basics of the join table solution in FileMaker. While the solution works fine as an illustration for join tables, it lacked many of the basic interface features that would make it a usable solution. In part three, I will show how to implement some of these features, namely the following…

Sub-Summaries, and Displaying % of Total

Recently on the Cafe Forum over at FileMaker Today, someone asked if it was possible on a sub-summary report, to display the percentage of records contained within that sub summary. Having never needed this functionality before, I decided to investigate how this might be done. What I came up with is a fairly simple and straightforward way to implement this.

Join my Table? – Part Two

This implementation assumes you have a basic concept of relational database theory, in particular the use of primary and foreign keys in tables.

As a brief catchup, a primary key is a field in a table which has a unique value for each record. A perfect example would be a serial number field, which has a different number for each record. As good database practice, every table in your solution should have a primary key field, regardless of whether it is used or not.

A foreign key on the other hand, is a field in a table, which contains the primary key value of a record from another table. This is how two records in different tables are linked/related to one another, and indeed is how we are going to link an ENROLLMENT to both a STUDENT and a COURSE.

Join my Table? – Part One

Perhaps one of the most asked questions that I see on the Cafe Forum over at FileMaker Today, is “How do I do join tables?”. While some users have an understanding of what they are, they may lack the FileMaker skills to implement them. Others are unfamiliar with the concept altogether, but will explain their real word example. Usually it is a prime candidate for a join table. This article provides a real world example that will give you an understanding of why join tables are important, and in what circumstances they should be used. The example will then be implemented in a simple FileMaker solution.

Thinking Outside the Loop

If you have spent any time developing in FileMaker, or programming in almost any language, you will be familiar with the concept of a loop. And when scripting your loops you probably have a favourite method that you use. This article presents and compare a number of looping techniques that can be used in FileMaker.