Subtitles of the Movie

Let's talk about the family of FileMaker products. It can be a little confusing when you see them all lined up. Which ones do you need? What do you need to program FileMaker? What do you need to deploy FileMaker? It can be a little confusing, so let's get an overview of these and then go into each one more in-depth so you can get an idea of what their feature set is. So, the first product is FileMaker Pro 10. It's your work horse. It does just about everything. You can develop a solution, a fully functional solution, in FileMaker Pro 10 and you can even deploy with FileMaker Pro 10, making your solution available to a network of people. FileMaker Pro 10 Advanced is exactly the same product as FileMaker Pro 10, but it has additional advanced features. Those would be advanced features for developers. It makes it a little bit easier for a developer to create a solution. FileMaker Server 10 and FileMaker Server 10 Advanced allow you to deploy. You can't program in them, only deploy, and deploy to a larger audience. They also have administrative tools, which we'll go over. Now, you'll notice that FileMaker Mobile is not listed here if you're familiar with the product. It has been discontinued. It's no longer available. There's no alternative from FileMaker at this moment. The closest alternative is a third party product called FMTouch. I've used it. It's great. It works on the iPhone, so it doesn't work with the variety of devices that FileMaker Mobile does, but it's a good alternative and you might want to check it out. So let's talk more in-depth about FileMaker Pro 10. FileMaker Pro 10 allows you to create fully customized relational database systems. You can use calculations, scripts, validation, auto enter, web viewers. All the features that FileMaker is known for are in FileMaker Pro 10. You can even share with up to nine simultaneous users over a LAN or WAN with FileMaker Pro clients or five simultaneous users over a LAN or WAN with a web browser client and instant web publishing, or IWP, so it's a great product, you can do a lot with it, but let's find out what FileMaker Pro 10 Advanced can do in addition to FileMaker Pro 10. Now, in this tutorial, we'll be using FileMaker Pro 10 Advanced, so I recommend it. It's not that you can't go through this tutorial and get a lot out of it. 95 percent of what we cover will be applicable to the regular FileMaker Pro 10. In fact, even where we use FileMaker Pro 10 Advanced, as you'll see in these features, it's not required to create a complete solution. Let's go over the specific features. First of all, it has everything that FileMaker Pro 10 has, everything listed on the previous slide. In addition, it can create Runtime solutions. These are standalone solutions. In fact, what you do is you bind a copy of FileMaker that doesn't allow you to go into define database or ScriptMaker or create calculations or fields, but it allows somebody to use your solution and you can distribute it royalty-free, license-free. There's no additional costs. So you can put a copy of your wonderful Contact Manager on a website, have people download it and use it, royalty-free. I don't use it much for Runtime solutions, but a lot of people do. My favorite features are the debugging and troubleshooting tools. FileMaker Pro 10 Advanced has a script debugger. This allows you to slow down your scripts so you can see them run one step at a time and we'll be using this throughout the tutorial so you can get an idea of how to use it, but I want you to know an overview of what you get with FileMaker Pro 10 Advanced. It's great. The script debugger will allow you to pinpoint because when you're walking through the script step by step, instead of really quickly, you can see what's happening in the background. You can see all the data changing, the layouts changing, all that kind of stuff. It really helps you pinpoint where a problem in your script it. Then my favorite feature, by far, is the Data Viewer. It does many things. You don't want to go ahead and pigeonhole it. It's got a lot of ability, so one thing it does is it can work with the script debugger to show you stuff, so if you're walking through a script and you don't happen to have a field that's referenced inside the script on the current layout because you just don't need to see it, well, the Data Viewer can show you the data that's going into that field. It can also show you variables. You can write in calculations. In fact, writing in calculations is one of my favorite things to do. In fact, you don't even use it with the debugger. You just go in and you open up the Data Viewer and you go to the section where you can write your calculations. What I like to do is use it as a scratch pad or a cocktail napkin, where you write your calculations. Instead of going into your script, writing the calculation, running the script, which might be 100 lines long, and seeing that the calculation didn't work, you can debug it inside the Data Viewer, not have to go in and out of ScriptMaker or even Manage Database, and perfect it and then Copy and Paste it to your script and it should work just fine.