July 10, 2014
Pleasantly surprised at how some of the native behaviors we thought we’d have to script for WebDirect are working really well.
Pleasantly surprised at how some of the native behaviors we thought we’d have to script for WebDirect are working really well.
A colleague was asking how to simulate a drawer effect in FileMaker where an animated slide panel appears to withdraw completely into the window edge. This is pretty easily done but there are a few tricks to keep in mind (below). Animated Slide Panels Download the demo file, based on the Invoices starter solution. Click “slide panel demo” in the header to show and hide the panel. Here...
Perform Script On Server (PSOS): Overview The “Perform Script on Server” script step was introduced in FileMaker Server 13 to let clients of a hosted file run scripts on the server. So with some careful planning, you can have the server do a lot of the heavy lifting the client machine would normally have to do (finding, sorting, processing, other data manipulation, etc.). This means you can sometimes...
If you’ve been building layouts for WebDirect you’ve likely seen that WebDirect may draw your objects before conditional formatting or hiding are applied. This never happens in the desktop, where rendering is now double buffered on both Mac and Windows, but it happens frequently in WebDirect. The video below shows this in action and suggests one technique to make it less obvious. The movie is taken from optimizing...
Since layout redraw is one of the slowest things a WebDirect (WD) layout can do, you’ll want to do whatever you can to minimize those redraws (which can appear your users as flashing or as a spinning busy icons). So, “do as little as possible”. This often means wrapping your commands in If() statements to see if they’re necessary. We don’t need to do this in Pro because...
The FileMaker 13v2 update has generated a lot of excitement about the fmp: protocol now being available for running scripts in all deployment situations. Previously, locally running files handled the protocol differently than their Go and Hosted counterparts. This made some of us a little hesitant to use this powerful new technology. However, it’s not just the UI power from Javascript that we get, although that certainly is...
SeedCode’s ProMaps lets you add your own links to Google Maps: users can click on a pin and run your own FileMaker scripts–going to that pin’s record in your FileMaker layout, for example. While ProMaps could always do this for hosted files, FileMaker’s 13v2 update now lets scripts like these run locally, not just when your FileMaker file is hosted. Learn more and download a ProMaps demo to...
Needless to say, we’re pretty psyched about what’s possible in WebDirect…
Just updated our Dec 5 article on popover workarounds to include notes on conditionally opening popovers and telling when a popover is open. Here’s the article. Enjoy!
Overview The animations introduced in FM13 are great, but they still don’t let us animate the transition from one layout to another. This is something we’re looking for as it’s often used in iOS apps to move from list to detail and back again. However, using full-layout slide panels, we can animate layout transitions as long as we’re careful to get the timings right. Our unlocked example file...
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