Subtitles of the Movie

The goal of these tutorials is to teach you how to develop your own FileMaker databases from scratch. Anyone can create a file from a template but then you're stuck with the template and what it offers. You could reverse engineer it and go in and figure out how the person who developed that template did it but I think it's better off if you really design it yourself, you really know everything that's going on. You know all the bells and whistles and all the nuts and bolts and everything that's going on in it. So you have a much easier time modifying it and personalizing it to your needs rather than going ÒWell I don't need this piece from the template, let's take that or I want it to work differently here.Ó You can design it from scratch and you'll have much more control over it. So again this is the goal of these tutorials, not to show you how to use templates but to create databases from scratch. So we're going to go up to the File Menu and choose New Database and we're going to choose to Create an Empty Database. So we'll click OK and before you quickly make a name for this database you want to think about naming conventions. This is the first time you've had to think about it, we'll talk about it in regards of the fields and tables and scripts and things like that. So when you're naming a file, you have to make sure it's something you want to stick with, you don't want to change it all the time because for instance you might have a calculation field that references the name of the file. So if you change the name of the file later on, you have to go back and change that calculation or maybe possibly multiple calculations. In fact you could have a multiple file solution that all connects together. You can make multiple tables inside FileMaker now and so you can have just one file with all these tables related together but there are reasons to make multiple file solutions where some of the tables are in one file and some of the tables are in another. And if you have that situation and you've connected them together and you decide, ÒOh, well I want to change the name of this file.Ó Well then you'll have to change all the references between those files also. So it's a good idea to start off with a name that you can use all the time, that you won't change, think about it. And then you may not have thought about this, what about cross platform issues. You may be on a Mac or a Windows machine and think; well this database will never go over to Mac or never go over to Windows. Well it's possible it could, so if it does you need to make sure you've considered naming conventions on both platforms are not exactly the same. So, it's a good idea to go up to the FileMaker.com website and eventually once you've gone through things, download a PDF document that some of the experts in the FileMaker market have written that show naming conventions for files, fields and everything. And possibly read it, now it's a long read it's about 100 pages long but it has some information that is very valuable. So I will try to give you some of those tips as we go along but if you find that you want more about naming conventions, try that PDF document at the FileMaker.com website. So I'm going to settle on a name called Contacts, cause we're making a Contact Manager. And we'll save it to the Desktop and the first thing you're going to see is Manage Database. Manage Database; you're going to be spending a lot of time in here. It's where you create the structure of your solution, it's the foundation of your house, it's the glue between the pieces, it's really everything and you have to spend a good deal of time thinking about how this works because if the foundation if your house isn't right, it doesn't matter how good everything else is, if the foundation crumbles, then everything else crumbles. So we need to make sure we really understand this and really develop it well. And basically you have 3 sections, tables and FileMakers made a Table for you based on your file name, it's one of the friendly things it does. Cause most databases when you're just starting out have one table so this works out great. And then of course there's the field section, hasn't made any fields because it doesn't know what context it has in it. We'll type those in, in the next part. And then relationships, these have table occurrences in here and we're going to get into these later on. Not right now, they're not really important. Just the field section right now is important. So, remember this, Manage Database is the structure or schema of your whole solution. You have to make things right here, you're going to be coming in and out of it a lot, make sure you treat this with a lot of respect and you're really learn this well because I don't care how good you are at scripts or designing layouts, if your structure isn't right it won't behave correctly and that's the most important thing. I don't care how good it looks on the outside if the inside is not correct and not functioning well, your database is not going to be success.