Subtitles of the Movie

We're going to spend a lot of time creating a Find script. You may ask why. It's really easy to get into Find mode. There are several ways to do it. You could click the Find button in the Status toolbar. You could go up to the View menu and choose Find mode. It's up to you. It may seem very easy to you, but you've got to realize that your users don't use FileMaker all the time and don't know all of the features that you know. You need to make things as easy as possible for them to use. So let's go over some of the issues that could occur. The biggest issue is when you're in Find mode, it looks like Browse Mode, or at least to a user. They don't necessarily see all this stuff up here. Especially if you have the Status toolbar, they don't see all this stuff, necessarily. Even if the Status toolbar is showing, they may not see the Find here. They may not see Find mode here. They may not see all the indicators that tell them it's in Find mode. In fact, in FileMaker 10, they now have these little icons that show up in the fields. That's because of this issue. If you keep coming up here and creating new requests, you'll see that they add them right here, and I'll do it with the keyboard command and we'll go through 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. As soon as we get to the 11th one, you get this message. Now, this message was added after the 10th request because a lot of people entered data into Find mode, thinking they're in Browse Mode and what happened is they'd call Technical Support and say FileMaker lost all my data, and we've had to try to explain to them, well, I think you might have entered your data into Find mode and then closed the file and opened it and it would be gone, of course, at that point. So there's a lot of confusion. Tech Support wanted this message in here because a lot of people were complaining. They didn't understand the difference between Browse Mode and Find mode, so you've got to realize that as a developer and try to guard against it. In fact, take a look at these buttons up here. A lot of these buttons have dual functionality. For instance, Add Customer runs the New Record-Request step. It's called New Record /Request because in Browse Mode it adds a new record, but in Find mode, it adds a new request. So they may even think that they're in Browse Mode because this button works. All these buttons over this entire layout were designed for Browse Mode. It's not really intended for Find mode and it can be very confusing for users, so make sure you understand that you need to idiot-proof your solution. You don't want to call your users idiots; you just want to make sure you understand the term idiot-proofing because if a user can get themselves into trouble, they'll get themselves into trouble. That's because they're just trying to get their job done. You've got to remember that. They're trying to go as quickly as possible and they're doing things. They don't notice things. You need to figure out what they could possibly do and stop them from doing that. It's kind of like designing a sidewalk. You need to make sure there's no places to trip on it. You know, people are just going to be walking along, not thinking, and they're going to trip and then you're going to have a lot of trouble. So, you also want to worry about the Status toolbar. We really don't want to show this because it's very complicated. There's a lot of stuff going on in here, you know, matching records, include, omit, operators that you can use and things like that, requests, and a user doesn't necessarily need these things. If you're designing a solution and doing it really well, you will hide the Status toolbar and understand that most users are searching on a couple of fields and one Find request. They don't need multiple requests. They don't need operators and things like that. Sometimes they do, yes, but most times they don't, so we need to tailor that Find job, figure out what the user wants to do most of the time and tailor a Find for it. If they want to do a Find on just the first and last name most of the time, well, then you should tailor the Find for that. You could have two Find areas, one for more complicated and one for a simple one. You need to figure out what your users want and try to give it to them so that it's less confusing so they can just sit down and use it without any training at all. So, you also need to realize, on these layouts, that there's a lot of stuff that they shouldn't access. For instance, the Global field in Find mode can't be clicked on and they go, why can't I get to this? You know, it works in Browse Mode, or they may think they're in Browse Mode. I mean, there's a lot of confusion here, but you also have your portals and related fields, so here's a portal down here. If somebody searches on that portal, they may not get the results that they expected. It's much easier to understand how to search fields in the current table. When you start including fields from another table, it gets a little more complicated, so you need to be aware of that and try to design a special layout for Find mode. That's what we're going to do. We're going to start off with that, but there's a lot more to do. There's a lot more idiot-proofing to add into this Find script, so it's going to take a while to do, but it's going to be very beneficial for your understanding how to design a solution that people will understand, no matter what, and never get themselves into trouble.