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FileMaker Pro 10: Beginner Tutorials

Introduction / FileMaker 10 Family of Products pt. 2

Subtitles of the Movie

FileMaker Pro 10 Advanced also has the Database Design Report. Imagine this scenario; think about a situation where you have a field and you're going ÒI can't remember what this field I used for. Uh, am I using it all inside the solution anymore?Ó Well you could go and try and track it down, you could go into manage database and see what calculations reference said and go into Script Maker and try to find every script that references it or go into define value lists and all over the place and see if anything is using it. This could take a long time or you could create your Database Design Report. And what this will do is create a report that is viewable in a web browser. And you'll go down to that field and you'll see oh, it's used on this layout. It just cross-references everything, makes it easy to locate and find out where each object inside FileMaker is used so you could look at a field, you could use a layout see where it's used. I mean it just has all this cross-referencing that really makes development on larger products really easy. Now there are many other advanced developer features for customize and solutions. One of my favorites is Custom Functions; this allows you to create your own functions. Imagine going into the calculation dialogue and using one of the existing functions like the case of the if or the left or the middle or the right. Well you can make your own left, middle and right. You go into custom functions and you create that and so what it allows you to do is call on a very complicated formula with a simple syntax like you see inside the standard functions that come with FileMaker. Not only that, if you happen to need to change that custom function, you've used it in 10 places throughout your solution, you change it in one spot and it flows through your whole solution and updates it rather than going to each spot and making the same update. Custom menus another great feature. What it allows you to do is take the menus because this slide show is done in FileMaker, so take any of these menus here and change them. For instance you could completely remove the records menu if you wanted to or you could change the name, you could change the name of any menu item you want. You could remove it, you can change the keyboard command, you can even make that menu item write your own script. In fact you can even make a completely new menu and menu items that all run scripts for yourself. So this is a great way in addition to buttons to control FileMaker for the user. Now Custom Functions and Custom Menus are still available to people who are in FileMaker Pro 10, the regular version. You have to program them in FileMaker Pro 10 Advanced but when you deploy your solution they'll still be there. The custom functions will be usable in the custom menu as well also. And one of my other favorite features is be able to Copy and Paste schema. Schema is things like fields, scripts, script steps, tables, things like that. You can easily copy and paste these things from one table to another. Let's say you had a field and you wanted to copy this field from this table over to another one. Well instead of having to type it in and add all the auto enter and validation things you might have on it, you just Copy and Paste it, makes life really easy. Let's talk about FileMaker Server 10; it's a high performance server software for teams of FileMaker Client Guests. You can share to up to 250 people at a time. That's a much larger group than what you can do with the regular FileMaker. It maximizes performance, that means you're gonna get the ultimate performance, even if you have just 10 users, you're going to get better performance than you will with the regular FileMaker Pro. It also has automation tools for backups and other administrative tasks. For instance in regular FileMaker Pro you have to quite FileMaker, make the backup cause you can't make the backup while the file is running and then launch it again. Well FileMaker Server can make a backup as the file is actually running. And there's plenty of other stuff that you can do with FileMaker Server 10 but we don't have time to go over it. Our focus in these tutorials is on developing solutions not deploying. But still I want to give you an idea of how this works, how FileMaker Server, what it's features are. It also has a log viewer with e-mail notifications, this is new. It supports XML, XSLT for custom web publishing. It also supports PHP for custom web publishing and it supports ESS or External SQL Data Source. So a great, great product if you're deploying to a great number of people, especially uh, greater than 10 people. Now what is FileMaker Server 10 Advanced? It has all the features of FileMaker Server 10 but one of the newest things that's different than FileMaker Server 9 Advanced is it has a maximum of 999 guest on a network with FileMaker Pro Client. This is a big jump. Before Server 9 Advanced still just had just the 250 limit. Now it goes up to almost a 1,000. It also supports ODBC and JDBC data sources, this is different than ESS and it supports instant web publishing with up to 100 simultaneous users.

Tutorial Information

Course: FileMaker Pro 10: Beginner
Author: John Mark Osborne
SKU: 33925
ISBN: 1-935320-18-1
Release Date: 2009-01-05
Duration: 15 hrs / 172 lessons
Work Files: Yes
Captions: Available on CD and Online University
Compatibility: Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux
QuickTime 7, Flash 8

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