Placeholder text is a great new feature in FileMaker 14. With it you can specify by calculation what label text is to appear in a field that is empty. You can also have complete control over the styling of that text.  In this article we demonstrate how to setup a placeholder and some of its benefits over standard labels.  We also show how placeholder text can be used as a powerful user interface tool for displaying virtually any calculated value direct on a layout without the need for fields or variables.

FileMaker 14 is here! To celebrate, FileMaker Weetbicks has written 14 articles all about FileMaker 14. Over the next few weeks we will be releasing these articles to the community. We cover all the cool new features (and some hacks!) and take things further as we usually like to do :) Stay tuned!

We are pleased to announce that FileMaker have today released version 14 of their software for desktop and iOS.

We are all incredibly excited by this release. It brings some new features that the developers have wanted/needed and we can see areas where we can further enhance your solutions. FileMaker WebDirect and FileMaker Go make some big leaps forward and both products are starting to ‘mature’ really nicely.

How do you turn a File in a container into interactive content? If the contents was inserted using "Insert File" then in the past your only option has been to export and re-import it as an interactive stream such as image, pdf or audio/video.  In this article we introduce an elegantly simple single step method to turn all of your old File based containers into beautiful interactive machines in an instant!

Xero remains the number one piece of software our clients want their FileMaker solution integrated with.

This has been the case for nearly five years now, but what we are finding is that clients are keen to integrate FileMaker and Xero in different ways, and for different business reasons.

Okay I’m an account manager so please don’t hold your breathe for any technical wonderments in this article. What you will read is what we have experienced in terms of developing FileMaker WebDirect solutions.

We have been lucky to work with two clients over the last few months where we have developed WebDirect solutions (we also have another three WD projects on the go).

At the end of last year FileMaker Inc announced the end of support for FileMaker 11 - that doesn't mean it will stop working, but it does mean they will no longer be doing updates such as bug fixes, compatibility and security patches.

Bringing together our love of FileMaker and Xero was always going to be a natural fit for Digital Fusion. We use Xero ourselves and when we come across clients using FileMaker and Xero we get excited, its a brilliant combination of running a business.

The ExecuteSQL function introduced in version 12 is a powerful tool for querying your database in a contextless fashion. One of its limiting features is it's lack of debugging help when it comes to writing properly formed queries, with the function returning a "?" if you get something wrong.  Turns out there is more to that question mark than meets the eye and within the question mark contains some useful descriptive error messages.

Over the past twelve months we have been approached by a number of clients to develop a solution as a proof of concept. What a client deems a proof of concept can sometimes vary but in essence it’s to develop a solution as a ‘minimum viable product’