Subtitles of the Movie

Before we start talking about saving found sets of records I want to talk about organizing ScriptMaker. And FileMaker 9 makes it really easy because they have this new feature called New Group, and when you choose it and click OKay you can create a new folder essentially. And we can move this anywhere we want, just like a script, and we can easily place scripts inside of this group. All we do is grab this little icon, move it up, and you see how we've got the little icon that says move left or right? When you get close to a group, it says, Hey, I can move right, and if you move a little bit like that it will move in there, indent, and you'll see that you have it inside that folder now. So that's pretty cool. You can organize them very easily. It's a lot easier than previous versions like FileMaker 7, 8, and 8.5, which didn't have this feature. Let's move that out of there. We'll get rid of that group, and let's start at the top of everything here. Right now I have some scripts that have no script steps. If you open one of these up there's nothing in them, and the reason for these is to just tell whoever's looking at the solution that I created. I usually put my name and information all over the solution just so it's clear who created it. So all of these scripts right here, all the way down to here, are blank. Just simply using them for the name so people can see what's going on. And then I have a separator here, which you do in FileMaker 9 through this option, and I don't use them quite as much as I did in previous versions of FileMaker because we have the folders, but I do still use them, and the reason is because they do this nifty little thing the folder just can't do. So if I come into any script and choose a Perform script, you'll see that it gives us Line, just like it does on layouts and other areas of FileMaker. So we'll close that up, and let's go to our About script. Now, the About script shows a custom dialog and then asks you whether you want to open the Website or not. I use the Open URL Script step if they chose message choice two, and simply allows you to put a calculation in here. I just did quote my website quote, but you could certainly use record references or field references, ah, any kind of function you want. And it's the only script I have that's checked right here, and the reason for that is I generally don't make scripts available from the menus unless I can control the context and this one's very easy because when you choose it there's no context worries here. You don't have to worry about what layouts you're in, what table you're in, etcetera. So, a lot of reporting and things like that, you can do that, because you're always going to change layouts with reports, but you've got to watch out. Like, for instance, in New Records, you're going to make sure where the context is and now you can do it from the menus, but I still want to kind of play it safe, so right now at this point, none of these scripts are available under the Scripts menu. Now the neat thing about these folders is, you can actually come here and choose one of the folders and see just that folder. So, it's much more useful than previous versions even with organizational techniques I'm going to show you in a little bit, because you can simply do the same thing as you do inside of ScriptMaker. You can come in here and say, Hey, I only want to show the navigation script steps; so very useful. In fact, you can come in here and type the first few letters of something and locate just those scripts and you'll see this one shows up there; so very, very handy. We'll delete that. And let's go ahead and open up all these sections here. It looks like we have all of them open except for New. There we go. Let's go through these. We have our subscripts with Allow User Abort and Set Error Capture. Now how you decide what your folders are named and how you organize the scripts is really up to you and may change from solution to solution. It's hard to say exactly what to do, but I like to have my subscripts easily accessible so they're up here toward the top and they're in this one section by themselves. Then we have our Open-Close scripts that are record scripts and you can see we've changed the name of our record scripts just slightly. I like to use these brackets here, these square brackets. We'll show you some different techniques in a little bit, but I just happen to like this. It really offsets this record word from new; it really makes it seem like, Oh, it's New Record. You can really see that. And there are other ways to do this and there are methods for being compatible with the Web and things like that, but if you're not going to the Web, I, I really like technique; this approach. So all of them are in here, and you can see I use a separator in here. Now I could have used a folder within a folder as you'll see later, but I didn't do that because there weren't a lot of scripts in here and I didn't want to make it so hard to get into them you had to click and open it up. You know I just thought separating this way was a good way to do it. Then you have your Security here. Okay. Change some names of some scripts here. Our Printing section, our Find section with a couple of separators here, our Navigation section, and then the Miscellaneous section is where I'm putting a lot of stuff and therefore I thought it was important to divide everything using the folder technique so I could easily close one section up. I had the feeling this will get fairly big and it may actually take a section if it gets really big and make it's own individual section. So, it's up to you. Use the tools how they make sense for you. You know, you don't have to have everything in a folder, in fact, you can have some things in subfolders and others not, just because there's not very many steps there. Then I have this New section here, and the reason I have this is sometimes I create scripts and I'm not sure where to ah put them, or to organize them, and so I temporarily put them in the New section, so that's what that's there for.