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FileMaker Pro 12: Beginner Tutorials
Introduction / New FileMaker 12 Scripts
Subtitles of the Movie (FileMaker Pro 12: Beginner / Introduction / New FileMaker 12 Scripts)
As I said before we're showing you really brief intros to these New FileMaker 12 Features. So we'll get into them in more detail later on throughout the tutorial. I want to give you an introduction, that's it at this point, just so you can kind of find out what these new features are all about and now we're going to talk about scripting. So we're going to go right into Manage Scripts and we have four scripts here, you already saw two of them run in the previous section but I'm going to show you what they actually comprised of. You can see that this is Windows Style Floating. So we're creating a new window and when you go in here you're going to see that we have Windows Styles here. You have all the same features you had before, Window Name, Height, Width so on but now you have this New Style. You can say I want a Document Window which is a standard type of window you're used to in FileMaker. This allows you full control, this one happens to change it to a Floating Document Window but you can also change it to a Dialog Window which is modal meaning you, you've got to dismiss it before you can go to the window behind it. The Floating would be good for a Floating Palette. Notice you also have control over what pieces show up, the Close Button, the Minimize, the Maximize, the Zoom Control Area and the Resize down in here or the Resize over here. All of those things are controlled but you can make a window with none of these on there if you want. It's very cool what you can do with this. So this next script is really the same thing. the only difference is we have this option chosen and notice that some of these dim out when you make it modal. Obviously you can't do certain things when it's modal, you couldn't minimize it. So those are very simple versions of those scripts and we'll run them in a second just to remind you, remember what they do. Now we also have some other things, we have New Tab Panel Scripts or Script Triggers. So we're going to go ahead and show this, we're going to Edit this and we're going to see a very simple script. It says My Name Is in the title, My Current Name is and you can put in here and we got the function here GetTriggerCurrentTabPanel. And what that will get is get that value out of there and so I'm going to put that into the message and you'll see what it actually comes up with. And notice that we're getting value 2 here, there are two values that get returned here so we're going to get several different results here. And also notice down here inside of this Show Custom Dialog we have the ability to Commit Data on all buttons, before you didn't have these Checkboxes. What you have now is the ability to say well I want Button 2 to also commit there because before if you clicked on this Button, even if it said Yes or whatever, it, it wouldn't commit the value that would be the input field here. It just would act like it was never there so now we have the ability to commit on any button you want, it obviously defaults to what it was before but that's really a big plus because I always wanted to be able to do that. And then our last script is Insert File, great features in here. We're going to go and take a look at this area here where you can change the dialog of the Insert File, you can change what you want to appear in there. For instance you can add in just images, just video, audio, all files, whatever you want and then that's all they can do from that Insert Dialog, they can't go beyond that. You have Storage Options here, let the user choose a reference and insert, you know whether it inserts directly into a file as a reference. You have the ability to display the icons however you want or content of the file if possible, all those kinds of things. You can choose to compress or not compress and this has to do with the Enhanced Container Fields. So there's all kinds of options here so you can customize that dialog to what, however you want it to appear. So let's take a look at how these things run. First of all we ran these before but let's show them again now that you've seen the script. We ran before the Windows Styles 1, that means it's a Floating Palette and again I can work inside this area with this floating on the top still. That's the benefit of that type and typically we wouldn't have a big giant window like this, you'd have a small window that's floating there for a, a maybe menu to take you to different areas. And then you have your Modal Dialog, if I click on here, I cannot get back to this window. I can't do anything except stay in this window until I dismiss it. And if I had the Close Box gone here. That was one of the options, I could have a little button in here that said Close It. So those are great, those are how those work. Now over here we have our Insert File, notice when I click on it, it says Insert Image here, I can only choose images, I can't change any of these options down here and I can go down and find whatever I want and have it do that action but I've limited them to what they can do and made it a little more you know customized to what they want. I love this feature, so I just canceled out of that. Then the next one is your Tab Panel Script Trigger, click on here, it says My Current Name is Tab 1, My Target is Tab 2 and moves to Tab 2. Do it again, there we go, it just as simple as pie, it's just that easy. So if you come in here and look at this script again or actually go from the perspective of Layout Mode, you'll see what's going on here. So go into Layout Mode and we'll come in here and click on this Object and we'll go in here to our Set Script Triggers. You'll see we're saying OnTabSwitch, this is the New Script Trigger. Run Tab Panel Show Name and again just to show you this one more time, what this dialog does is shows two different things, GetTriggerCurrentTabPanel and GetTriggerTargetTabPanel and returns several values and you can discover those as we go through them. For now I'm going to leave it a mystery at this point but it has several values it returns, whether it's you know the, the name that you've assigned it or whatever. So there's a lot of cool things going on here. Now we also have Insert from URL, so if we go ahead and run that, you notice that what we've done is we've inserted information directly from the Databasepros website. You could do this already with another function but it was more complicated, it's made it more accessible so you can take all that detail, all that HTML code from whatever URL use, you put in there and I'll show you what it is and put it right in here. Put it right in there and search it or, or parse it or do whatever you want with it. So it's very cool what you could do with that, that information once you pull it from a, a URL. So all we've done here is attached it directly to here and you see the new badge here which is kind of cool for a button. Come in here you see that I've just specified that URL directly in here, I could have specified a field if I wanted to and you can just pull that information directly from that, it just goes over the Internet and grabs it. So some very cool features in the Script Area as far as I'm concerned. I'm not as, as in overwhelmed by the Calculation Functions but the Script Features definitely I'm very much a big fan of these.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | FileMaker Pro 12: Beginner |
| Author: | John Mark Osborne |
| SKU: | 34323 |
| ISBN: | 978-1-61866-046-6 |
| Release Date: | 2012-06-08 |
| Duration: | 16 hrs / 169 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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