Back in December, Digital Fusion launched FileMaker Weetbicks - a section of the main site dedicated to FileMaker articles of a technical nature. The idea behind creating the site was to give something back to the wider FileMaker community, and act as a resource for developers of all skill levels.

The night after the earthquake, out checking on the state of my father's house, I started thinking about friends and acquaintances that I hadn't checked up on. I happened to be driving at the time past a street where I knew an ex-colleague lived. I hadn't seen him for some years, and the suburb was largely untouched, so I put it out of my mind.

Using an auto-enter calculation on a field is a great way to populate its contents when other fields are modified, including itself. But what do you do if you want to use a calculation that references itself without having it trigger its own auto-enter calculation? The answer lies in thinking outside the calculation...

In applications such as Mail, you may notice that window names can be dynamic, dependent upon the contents of a field. In the case of Mail, the subject dictates the window name. In this article I'll demonstrate a way this can be replicated for FileMaker, and more importantly, how these dynamic windows can easily be selected again once created…

If you have spent any time developing in FileMaker, or programming in almost any language, you will be familiar with the concept of a loop. When scripting your loops you probably have a favorite method that you use. This article presents and compares a number of looping techniques that can be used in FileMaker in an attempt to locate the fastest method...

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...