Subtitles of the Movie

The Manage Database Dialog is going to become very familiar to you. You're going to spend a lot of time in this dialog, that's because this is where you create the structure of your database or the schema. So again you have the table section, the field section and the relationship section. We're going to stick to the fields for right now and we're going to show you how to create fields for your Contact Manager. So, before you start just typing in field names, you need to think about it. You don't just want to name them anything. You want to have some naming conventions. And again this is similar to what we did with the name of the file. I'm going to give you some ideas about naming fields. Every developer in the world has slightly different ideas and some have very different ideas. So again you can look to ideas from this tutorial. I'm going to give you some ideas and you can also go to the FileMaker.com website and download the developer conventions white paper. Now I can't tell you exactly what the link is because they've changed it several times but if you have any trouble finding it, you can always contact me. Now, so what we're going to do here is we're going to consider several things before starting our field naming. One thing is you need to consider this database may go up to the web. It's very possible; FileMaker can publish the data from its database to a web browser. You can do it in PHP or XML, either one will do it. And when you're doing that you gotta think of Google, Google is simply a database where you're searching the Internet database. And when it searches, if you've ever looked at the URL, up above, you'll see that there's information in there about what you typed in. So if we don't obey any naming conventions, when we look at the URL from a web published FileMaker database, we're gonna get some weird characters in there. For instance if you use spaces, it'll convert it to a percent 20. That's because FileMaker understands spaces but the web browser doesn't. So we want to keep it to lower case, lower aske and no spaces so it's comfortable with a web browser just in case. Not only that, you want to make sure you uh, stick to naming conventions that make sense and you'll see those in a second. We're going to start off with our first contact field, which will be company. And it's always a good idea when you type in your field, right down here that you give it a comment. This field stores data about the organization. The reason I say that this is so important and it does take a little bit of time to type it in is because, maybe not in the case of this field but in some fields I can tell you six months down the line I've completely forgotten what this field is for. It may not be a data entry field; it may be a field for some script or some calculation. And it may not be obvious and a simple comment that takes you 10 seconds to type in may save you 20 minutes later on. It'll obviously make it a lot others who come in and look at your solution to make sense of it as well. So spend the time putting the comments in so you can have a quick note about what each field is. So we'll create that and then we're gonna come in with the first name field. We're not going to do first name, we're gonna do name, first. The reason we're going to do this is because we'll have last name and if we did first name and last name when you sorted your fields, they would be in 2 different places, I want them to sort together. So this is an important naming convention. Naming like fields with the same names. Now I'm not doing this to the ultimate degree, I could have every data entry field and every calculation field, a whole intricate naming convention. But here's some basic ideas, you don't have to use all those developer-naming conventions but some simple ones will really help you. Now I'm also gonna really remove this comment here because it'll take us too long during this tutorial to type them in and I want to go quickly but I want to stress it's very important to type in the comments. So we'll hit Create, you'll notice after you hit Create that it highlights Name First again. Well we can just type right over that, Name Last and then instead of grabbing the mouse, just hit the enter or return key. Then we can type in address 1, address 2, you can see how fast that is, how efficient it is rather than grabbing the mouse. We'll go to city, state, postal code. Notice I'm using an underscore there, we'll also put a phone field in there. Now we're going to make the phone field a text field, if you haven't noticed yet the type is right here and we can change the type over here but we're not ready to do that yet. The reason the phone field is a text field is because you might have some formatting. It's not just numbers, you might have some brackets and some dashes and some spaces, who knows what. So you need to make it a text field. Same with postal code, you might have zip plus 4 or you might have Canadian postal code, which has letters in it. So you want to keep that open so that you can type any type of zip code or postal code in there. And we'll also make an e-mail field.