There were some great discussions at FileMaker Bootcamp (thank you Russell Kohn, Lee Lukehart, Allen Imbarrato, and Bob Majors) along with a spirited discussion of naming conventions.
Jonn Howell proposed these conventions (where CON is his abbreviation for “Contacts”)…
___kp_CON primary key
__kf_CON foreign key
_kg_selected_CON global key
What do you think of that?
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7 Comments
I really don’t understand the desire to put the keys at the top with leading underscores. We tried that early on when 7 came out and I hated it – it’s in the way when the user is exposed to a field list in sort or export dialogs and it doesn’t match any other naming format for the rest of the fields. I know it puts the keys within visual range when connecting TO’s but I find that it doesn’t take much longer to just a line between the two TO’s (using any fields) and edit the relationship. Each field list has type-ahead making it easy to jump to the keys with a zk__ prefix. The __p suffix idenitifes the primary.
Do we need to specify the table for the primary key? Just using ___kp gives you the ability easily abstract the primary key.
True Jason, but I kind of like seeing those prefixes in calcs and layouts so I know if someone has grabbed the wrong field. Though I have to admin I almost never see primary keys on layouts.
BTW. Dan Stein reminded me that using a prefixed underscore in FMP 10 causes an ODBC XML parsing error. Something to keep in mind.
John the ‘_’ ODBC XML Parsing error is why we moved to aa__PKI_Contact_ID_n several years ago and normal use fields being Contact_Name_First_t while developer and utility fields get the zz_ or zz_UT_ treatmeant to push them to the end.
I like Simon’s a bit better. We prefer easy to read keys. I do like the triple and double underlines for the key sort order.
Given the example above we use this:
_ID for the primary, no matter what table it is in.
_IDContact for a foreign key.
_IDContact.Selected for a global key.
We’re want to make it easy to understand, read, and use.
I use the Table names. I guess the underlines would help to put all the Id in the beginning. I am not sure why the foreign key has one less Underscore.
Oreste
For about 5 years I have used the following.
__id__CONTACTS__p
_id__contacts__f
_id_contacts_selected__globN
1. Capital letters for primary key only
2. Note the underscores
3. The global field is a numeric one