FileMaker Pro 11: Advanced Tutorials
Final Touches / Check List
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Subtitles of the Movie (FileMaker Pro 11: Advanced / Final Touches / Check List)
I could sit here and fiddle with this database forever. I'd tweak it over here, then over here, switch to a different layout, tweak it there and I'd never be done. At some point you have to let the perfectionist in yourself go and say the project's finished. Ship it out to your commercial customers or release it to the rest of the employees in your company - you have to let it go at some point and so what we have now is a Checklist for what you should do at the end of a project. It's not exhaustive, you might add to this, you know, checklist yourself, but I think these are some of the most important things. And the first idea on your Checklist is to make sure you have everything organized. If you don't have everything organized when you come back and look at this project because it probably took you six months to do it and you're going to take a two-week vacation right afterwards, believe me, you'll forget everything. So you need to make sure everything's organized. So go into Manage Scripts and you want to make sure everything's nice and neatly organized into folders. If you're not sure where something goes well then put it into the New folder. You can have a few in here and decide where they go later, it's up to you, but just have it nice and neat here. Very important for remember where you left off, for finding something, you know, just making it easy on yourself. You should also organize your Relationships and we've done that quite a bit as we've been going along. You should try to do it as you along and what you should try to do when you get this done is to try to make it so no lines overlap or at least they overlap very rarely. That way it makes it very easy to see, oh, this goes over to here and you can double-click on this but sometimes it's easier to trace something like this if you don't have all this overlapping stuff and make things just really easy to find and, you know, color code them and things like that. Then you should also do the same thing with your Layouts. You should make sure your layouts - we'll go into Layout Mode and do Manage Layouts - you should make sure that they're nice and neatly organized here. You could have some layouts at the end that aren't in folders but, you know, you'd have some type of organization and put your most important layouts that you work with inside an organizational structure like we have. These we don't use quite as much so they're not organized. And, come and uncheck all of your folders and your layouts so they don't show in the Layout Menu. This is an extra deadbolt on your door. It's likely that when somebody logs on you're going to hide this Status Toolbar but if somehow they get it open watch what happens when I click on this Layout Menu. Nothing happens because I have them all unchecked. They can't switch. You can switch in Layout Mode, no problem, just not in Browse Mode, or you can't do it in Find Mode or Preview Mode, only in Layout Mode. So that's a good idea to go ahead and put that extra lock on there and you usually do it at the very end of the project because it's nice to be able to switch layouts in Browse Mode, too. And it's always important to comment everything, and we tried to do a little bit as we've been going along but we haven't commented everything because we pointed out that you should and it would take up too much time in these tutorials, but you have many places you can comment. You have scripts, for instance. You can come into any script and you can come in and throw on a Comment Script Step. So if you haven't been that good about it you should come back and comment your script. In fact, most script steps or a large portion of them have calculations on them like the If or the Else If and you can put your comments right inside the calculation, or any calculation that you have you can comment right inside that. And this is really helpful when you come back six months later, a year later, even two weeks later, you don't forget what you've done. It may have been a brilliant idea when you did it, but you'll forget what you did. You don't have to comment simple stuff, just the stuff that's maybe not as obvious. And so you can also comment your fields and we covered that also but, you know, let's make sure you understand. Come back and comment any fields you haven't commented. You know, we did quite a few at the beginning, let's see, I think in the Customers we did a few here, see if we can find them here - well, don't look like any of them, but you comment them right here, so you should make sure the ones that are maybe not obvious you should comment them so you know what they're doing. So go through and do that as well as document it. If you really want to document something you should write up something about how to use the system, how it's programmed, the kind of ideas you used behind it - at least maybe a couple of pages or 10 pages of documentation about your basic ideas about how to approach this in case you get hit by a bus and somebody else has to take over, or maybe you leave for another job and you want to pass this along to somebody else. Just a good idea to do. And usually the very last thing I do to my solution is I set the Tab Order. Why do I do it at the end? Well, I don't want to keep setting the Tab Order each time I decide to add a new field. When I'm done with the project you set the Tab Order then and that way you only do it once in your entire lifetime - well, maybe more, you know, maybe somebody'll say, oh I don't like the tab order and you'll have to change it, but hopefully it's not every five seconds, every time you make a change, like, oh, I've got to fix that Tab Order, so save that till the end and set it all up properly at the end. So, that's your Checklist. Develop your own Checklist and figure out which things you need to do before you send your project out for people to use it. You know, there should be certain things you do at the very end that you want to write down on an actual electronic document, or write down so you don't forget to do them.
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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