One of the shortcomings of FileMaker is its inability achieve easy cross-tabular reports and data entry in a normalized structure. There are various techniques to replicate cross-tabular interfaces, but they often involve many relationships for either the columns/rows, or are for display only. The goal of this article is to present a lightweight method for cross-tabular data entry using as few relationships & fields as possible...

When FileMaker 11 was released, one of the lesser documented changes in behavior concerned the defining of menu names when dealing with Custom Menus. When any menu element has an empty name, an interesting thing happens...

Pretty much everything in FileMaker comes with some form of comment box to let you add more information - such as fields, menus, custom functions, calculations, scripts, and the graph. However the one area lacking in a comment box is value lists, unless that is, you think a little outside of the box…

This article explains why Flush Cache can be detrimental on performance, and offers an alternative and more efficient method for refreshing relationships...

All too often, the Refresh Window script step is used with the 'Flush Cached Join Results' option checked. Sometimes this is through lack of understanding, but other times it is required to refresh those pesky relationships which have trouble re-evaluating. This article explains why Flush Cache can be detrimental on performance, and offers an alternative and more efficient method for refreshing relationships…

There are many ways in which users can select records, so that each user can keep their own unique selection. This particular method uses a portal showing related records as a selection tool. The main technique involves using a value list & checkbox to easily achieve selection with no scripting required…

Recently I was working on building a large layout which is used for both printing and data-entry. One of the requirements was I needed to show a lot of "private" information that the data-entry person needed to see, but was not to be printed. The issue was solved using a very cool property of sub-summary parts…

Using Popup windows is common FileMaker technique for showing more information, managing dialogs, and running wizards to name a few. However, all to often little care is given to the aesthetics of creating and positioning a popup, leading to an unpolished and half-finished feel. This article gives some pointers on how you can create popups that are clean, efficient, and correctly positioned.

This article demonstrates how you can filter a relationship to one table, by using information located in a related table. The example I will be using is filtering a relationship to a Customer table, but by searching on a customers related Contacts, which are in an entirely different table…

Digital Fusion is proud to announce the arrival of FileMaker Weetbicks. This is our gift back to the FileMaker community, and is where we will be publishing FileMaker related tips, techniques and example files, for users and devlopers alike.