101 Things to do with Filemaker™ Pro
Filemaker™ Pro software is awesome. There, I said it. When I first saw it in the late 80s and compared it to Panorama and 4D, it wasn’t my first choice, but after a year or so, Filemaker™ had come a long way and had a big advantage of the others – it had multi-user baked in. How far we’ve all come in 30+ years.
As we work with any development environment like Filemaker™ Pro †, we all tend to learn (or create) certain patterns for our work. Putting it in the larger development / programming universe they are literally called development patterns and have been given names (Active Record, Factory, and Adapter). We’re always giving things names when we have to refer to them very often. It’s why you and I have names. 🙂
So I went looking for a list of those patterns in the Filemaker world and discovered there’s precious little available and so I started thinking what a list like that would look like in Filemaker™ Pro? (Some good info here ) As we start documenting some of these things and relying on an underlying technology was added to the environment after certain versions, we need to make sure to mention it as a required version of FM or required plugin where we use them.
Each feature or technique requires occasional tricks or unusual setup to solve some problem. We’ll be collecting those tricks as well in this little zoo of ideas. Some of these items will involve other integrating technologies like php, sql, or plugins. We try not to discriminate on the basis of technology choices.
What follows is a list of individual ideas, techniques, and development patterns that we are all using to build our solutions. Perhaps I’m just looking for a place to structure my thinking on the subject… either way – let’s take a look at some things you can do with Filemaker™ Pro.
† It seems like this would be a good place to put an abbreviation, but Filemaker Corporation has rules about exactly how one can use their name and trademarks and I really don’t want to run afoul of any corporation’s legal team. (http://bit.ly/2TqMciO)
Leave a Reply