FileMaker Pro 11: Advanced Tutorials
Event Driven Scripting / Commit Record
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Subtitles of the Movie (FileMaker Pro 11: Advanced / Event Driven Scripting / Commit Record)
There's one script trigger we skipped simply because it's in a different place than all of the standard script triggers. It's called InstallOnTimer Script, so it's actually a script step. It allows you to run a script at specified intervals. We're going to show you a basic implementation since there is no really ah-ha example where you go, oh, I could use that exactly there. I think everybody's use is going to be a little bit different. But let's show you an example that you might like or, you know, at least you'll get the idea how this works and you can formulate something for your own use. So we're going to go into Manage Scripts, we're going to create a New Script. We're going to call it Install On Timer. There we go and you simply use this script step right here. Move it in there and it has two options of the scripting you have to specify and an interval in seconds. So all you have to do is figure out what your interval is. Well, what we're going to do here is we're going to Commit Records. We're going to say if the user hasn't used something in 10 minutes, you know, they haven't typed anything, they're probably out to lunch and we want to commit the record so it's not locked anymore. You know, of course, you could have something on FileMaker Server that says Disconnect that user when they're inactive and that's certainly one way to do it, but you could also use this technique, this approach, without disconnecting them simply commit that record. And all you have to do is put some test in here to make sure we don't commit the record while they're typing and stuff like that and that should work pretty well. So what we have to do is figure out what's our interval. Well, in this example it's probably really short because we want to be able to demonstrate. I don't want to wait 10 minutes, so we're going to put in 5 seconds. Now, what you'd want to do is, you know, if you wanted to do 10 minutes well, you take 60 seconds per minute and multiply it by 10 which would be 600. We're going to do, let's say, 7 seconds here. That should give us enough time between each one. And then we need to specify a script. We don't have that yet, so we're going to save this and we'll create another New Script, call it Commit and we'll call it Inactivity. There we go. We're going to start off with an IF statement and it's not going to make as much sense until we come back and look at it again but we're going to say: does dollar sign dollar sign Field equal Get ActiveFieldName and not isempty get activefieldname. There we go. So, again, we'll come back to this and take a look at it in a second after we've put in the rest of it so it makes more sense. So if that's true we're going to say let's commit the records. We'll move it in there and I'm going to choose to Skip data entry validation and Perform without dialog because the person's not at their desk. So we'll do that. That may or not always be the option that you want but we're going to do it here. Otherwise, what we're going to do is set our variable. That's how we're going to get a value in there. We're going to say: dollar sign dollar sign Field, we're going to set that to Get ActiveFieldName. There we go. So let's go back to the IF statement here. We say: if dollar sign dollar sign Field equals the ActiveFieldName, the currently active field name which we declared down here, meaning that it ran once, put a field name in here and then ran again and go, oh, it's the same field, that means they probably haven't done anything because they're still in the same field. I doubt they're going to stay in some field for 10 minutes or maybe you decide it's a half an hour or something like that. But also we have to check to make sure there's, you know, something inside of the active field name. We don't need to commit the records if it's already committed. So those are the two tests. You might think up other ideas to put in here to test whether they're active or inactive, but this is the basic test we're going to do here. So we'll save this, come over here to the Install OnTimer, we'll attach that script, go all the way down to the bottom and that's it. Now, normally you put this inside of your Open Script so it opens and runs continuously every 10 minutes or half an hour as they're using the program, but we're going to leave it under the Menu for right now so we can run it from the Script Menu and demonstrate it. So we'll come over here. We'll go to our Tools and show our Script Debugger so we can really see what's going on and then we'll show our Data Viewer as well. Make that a little bit smaller, put that up there and we can still see a couple of fields which will be good enough for what we're trying to do here. Let's see, maybe we can make it a little bit better here. That looks good. OK, so what we're going to do is come up here and run it and we'll hit Play here and I'll make sure I have a field selected and we just have to wait 7 seconds here. Soon as we do that, we see it runs. We see that it simply sets that variable. We have to go to the current section to see that, and now what's going to happen this time is imagine 10 minutes have gone by but really only 7 seconds have gone by, it commits the record here. And you can see it's running faster than I can keep up with it. There we go, put it in the field right there. We'll run that, you can see if we switch fields this time that this time it doesn't commit it because I switched fields and, of course, if I go ahead and exit out of here, out of all fields, it'll automatically just set that value. So, pretty cool how that works. You can use it in many, many different situations. Let's stop all this stuff from running here. For instance you could update a chart, you know, maybe you want to have a chart updated with, you know, people are constantly entering information, you want to have that chart constantly changing. Maybe they're using this chart on a Dashboard with other Summary Values, so you want it to update, let's say, every minute so that people can get that information, maybe you're using FileMaker in the upper right hand corner to see how real estate sales are going or how stocks are moving, or things like that. Maybe you have some type of communication inside of FileMaker, not E-mail, but a way to send notes back and forth as records and you want it to appear in a Portal and you want that to update. You could use InstallOnTimer there. Maybe you want reminders to come up every hour to remind people about their To Do's. I mean, there are so many applications of this script step to have things run on intervals that we really can't cover all of them. It'll be really up to your imagination.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | FileMaker Pro 11: Advanced |
| Author: | John Mark Osborne |
| SKU: | 34140 |
| ISBN: | 1-936334-36-4 |
| Release Date: | 2010-07-09 |
| Duration: | 14.5 hrs / 159 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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