Subtitles of the Movie

As you can see there's quite a few new features in FileMaker Pro 9. We're going to try to go over each one of these briefly but we won't go in depth in each one of these features because we just don't have the time right now, but we will later on in the tutorial. And we'll use them when needed inside of the building and the solution we're going to create. So I think it'll make more sense to cover these more in depth then. But I want to give you an idea of how they work briefly so you can go on and experiment with them a little bit. Let's start with the new feature. This is probably the biggest one, External SQL Data source or ESS. This goes way beyond the previous ODBC import and export abilities. Essentially you have a live connection because FileMaker is controlling everything that's going on with the external data source connection. You don't need scripts to do everything, to exchange data and do finds. It's really quite easy, you go ahead and go up to the File menu. You go to this new Manage menu and that used to be Define and you'll see the database is under there, still the normal things you saw but now you'll see External Data Sources. So what you can do is set up connection to this External Data Source and then you can put those tables into your FileMaker file. You can put the fields in there. In fact, you can even say auto-enter into a field that's from an external data source. You can validate. You can even make a calculation based on those. So what's happening is when you integrate this into FileMaker it's all happening with out you running any scripts. So it's essentially live. It's the real feeling of a regular FileMaker field. Now there are limitations of course. But essentially people won't really know the difference between the two. So it's a really great, really cool feature. So let's go onto the next slide. Let's talk about the E-mail link, really easy to do. We'll over to an example file. It's really better just to look at it and see how it works. If you go up to the File menu and choose Send Link you'll see that it creates an E-mail in your default E-mail application and includes information; how to connect up to that solution and even instructions about it; so not a gigantic feature but a very nice feature. So it allows you to send information in an E-mail regarding how to connect to the current file over the network; includes a pass so you just simply go into the Open Remote Dialog. So this is very handy for an administrator just to get this information out. And again, you can add anything onto the E-mail you want. Here's a great feature, Conditional Formatting, one that I've wanted to see for a while. It allows you to format a field much like you would with number formatting or date formatting. But use text as the conditional format. So let's take a look at that. Let's take a look at the new example and what we're going to do is format this field right here, this text field. So we'll go into Layout Mode. Click on the text field. Go to Format and choose Conditional. And we can add in a condition. Now there are two choices Formula Is or Value Is. Now I'm going to use Value Is just to briefly describe it but Formula Is, is the ability to program a calculation with all the calculation functions your used to. That's a little more complicated. We're going to give you the basics here. So we'll do Value Is equal to, we'll simply put John Osborne. And then we can choose any of these options or multiple options. I'll choose Text Color and change it to red. We'll click Ok. Go to Browse Mode. Save the changes. You notice that it's red here. But, if we go to the next record it doesn't have John Osborne. It stays black. Now notice when we click in there it's just formatting. It doesn't actually change the text. So it's just on this layout. So it's a very, very neat little feature. The next feature is Auto Resizing Layout Objects. And really you have to see this to believe it. So let me just demonstrate it. What we're going to do is go into Layout Mode. But before we do that let's show you what happens when you make the window bigger. Basically nothing except nothing except the window gets bigger. Let's go make some changes in Layout Mode. And what we're going to do is view object info. Now you may have seen this before. You may not have seen this before. Essentially it allows you to change the dimensions of an object that is selected. So if we clicked on an object like this tag control, you'll see that the dimensions come in here. And you can actually change these and modify them. But there's now this Auto-Resize option. It has anchors on the four corners of an object. And the default is for these two to be anchored. Let's try saying anchor it to the right and see what happens. So simply doing that is good enough. We'll close that. Go to Browse Mode, save it and now when we resize you'll see that this is anchored to that side so it grows. Now with a little bit of work or maybe even a lot, you can make it so that your layout, your objects on it grow with the size of the window. Now you have to do a little work with this because not every object should grow, and sometimes objects could overlap. So you have to be creative with this but a very neat feature and helpful so that you don't have to design one layout for this screen resolution and another layout for another screen resolution - can make it very handy in your development.