Leverage your FileMaker Audit Logs Here is a common reporting request: the customer has a project with a status field that changes over time. They’d like a report that shows what the status of the project was on a given date in the past. This can be pretty hard to do if you hadn’t anticipated this request to begin with. Fortunately, running a FileMaker audit log isn’t that...

Making FileMaker 13 Buttons Easy to Modify FileMaker 12 and 13 give us a lot of new tools for making buttons look great. But if you want to use both an icon and text in your button you’ll need to make some tough decisions as this isn’t well supported out of the box. The main issue is that while you can use an image as the fill for...

More Fun with FileMaker Animations: Slide Panels By carefully positioning images within slide panels we can get a nice animated effect when clicking a simple switch. This doesn’t use any tricky code, just a very careful placement of the image inside a slide control whose radius has been set to match that of the switch image. Just like a regular button, we use a simple script to set...

Popovers are one of my favorite things in FileMaker 13. Like tab panels and slide controls they’re a region within a layout, but unlike our other enclosures they don’t take up any space when they’re not in use. We love them.  But they have a couple of unexpected behaviors you’ll want to be aware of as you start putting popovers to work. FileMaker 13 Popover Bugs Issue in...

FileMaker 13 Slide Controls + Refresh Object = Faster Layouts For starters, don’t forget about the new script step “Refresh Object”– I did. I had some icons whose “hide” status was based on the visibility calc : GetLayoutObjectAttribute ( “Home” ; “isFrontPanel” ) Now, isFront doesn’t just evaluate as slide panels move around so I’d added a Refresh Window script step to get them to behave. However, the...

Hiding FileMaker Objects: The Old Way Before FileMaker 13 there was no native way to make an object conditionally visible. And sometimes it seems like we developers spent an inordinate amount of our time working around issues of “reflow” and “visibility”: getting objects to slide into the position vacated by now absent objects, and getting objects to show and hide correctly in the first place. Think of button...