Subtitles of the Movie

So, let's demonstrate how this works and let's create a new record. Now, we could go up to the Records menu, but if you design your solution well, you won't have a Records menu. You'll use custom menus to design this for your specific solution. You should really have something specific to that solution because there's way too many choices underneath here. People are not going to use all of these choices. They're not going to use Show Omitted Only and Modify Last Find. Maybe they will, maybe they won't, but if you don't need it in your solution, don't provide it. Therefore, use custom menus or use buttons. If you use a button, you can put a name on that button. If you use custom menus, you can put in whatever you want there, not New Record. So make your solution. It's your job as a developer to make your solution easy to use for your users. In fact, my goal is that they won't have to do anything; it'll just make sense when they get into it. So we're going to create a new invoice here and you see the first field, the tab order is the one to select the customer, so we'll choose Apple Computer. It fills it in. These are all related fields here. OK, come down here. We're going to choose some products that they want to purchase, so we'll choose a dragonfly lamp. Maybe they want two of those, and we'll come down and choose another product. Maybe they want a flower lamp. Maybe they just want one of those. So you've filled out an invoice. You have the ability to print it, delete it, duplicate it. We'll get into those during this tutorial, but let's also go look at some of the navigation areas. You can walk through the records, if you want. We've scripted this. Notice that the status area is not showing. A good solution should recreate the status area because that's using up a lot of space that you can use for other things in this limited screen real estate area. You can go to List view and you see all of these invoices. Here's the one that we just created. If we click on this button, it takes us to the Invoices view so you can see the entire invoice. We can hit Find, come in here and search for anything we want. Choose Billed, hit Continue, and it finds all the billed invoices. So you can see that this is a very powerful solution that makes it very easy for people to use if you design it right. In fact, you'll notice that we can also switch over to another section. We can go to Customers. Now, you could do this with custom menus as well. I show this technique for people who don't have custom menus, but it really, when you see us work with this, we'll actually put a menu up here that allows you to do the navigation through that, rather than clicking once in here and then clicking the button, but once you get going, you can flop between customers and invoices very well. So in the Beginner tutorial, we're going to start creating this and then eventually we're going to get to invoices and create all of this. Now, there's a lot I haven't shown you, but hopefully this gives you an idea of where we're going with this solution. So let's go back to our slides here and let's demonstrate another solution. There's a second solution called the FileMaker Reference. This solution is also not unlocked. This is a commercial solution I sell, but I will be grabbing things out of it. Anything I grab out of the FileMaker Reference, I'll give to you in the Work Files. That doesn't mean I'm going to give you the whole FileMaker Reference, but I do it to make things work faster, to quickly get a graphic, get a calculation, get a script, things like that. So, but any time, again, I do that, I will go ahead and provide that calculation or that graphic to you. So I want to give you a short little description of how this works. So we'll Show Window and there's FileMaker Reference. Since we're going to be spending most of our time in the graphics area, I'm going to go there first. As you can see, there are container fields here. That's one record. Here's another record. All of these graphics go together and they correspond. If you look down at the red, they correspond to this. There's one piece, the outside. There's another piece right there, and there's the middle piece. We'll get into more on how this works, but all of the graphics are in here and you can drag them from this FileMaker file into your FileMaker file and we'll be doing that quite a bit. And we can go back to the main area. We can go into calculations and you'll see that we have tons of definitions here, but also we can go into the examples and grab different formulas and I'll be doing that. I'll be searching in here, finding a formula, grabbing it, pasting it into my solution, so that's the idea behind the FileMaker Reference. We'll give you everything that we copy out of here in the Work Files section, so don't forget about that. There we go. Let's talk about the Work Files. We've mentioned them, but let's get more details. Each chapter has Work Files. Work files could be supplementary files, like graphics, tables, tables we might import into our solution. In fact, in every single work file for each chapter, there will be actual solutions that you've been creating. We'll have the beginning and the end, so in other words, when we start the chapter, we'll have the state of the file at that point and, when we end the chapter, we'll have the state of the file at that point. So this will help as far as reviewing things. You can go back and review a chapter without going through the whole thing because you'll have the beginning of that chapter. You can grab that file and follow along with it. So don't forget, look inside the Start folder and you will find that you will see that there is a Start.FP7 file, so look for that file and you will be able to start off on any chapter you want, review it, do whatever you want. A lot of people miss this Work Files area. Don't miss it. Find it right away because you're going to really need to use it. It's going to be really helpful for when you're going through these tutorials.