Learning Claris FileMaker

Low-code is perfect for smaller businesses with small IT budgets. Explore the Airtable platform with one of our top low-code developers.

Learn how to authenticate website users through your chosen identity provider and have them end up inside your FileMaker WebDirect file.

Discover FileMaker 19

Every year, our team at Soliant Consulting enjoys our involvement in Claris early beta testing programs.

We’ve recently had time to explore FileMaker 19 extensively and have prepared an executive summary to share our thoughts on features of interest and how to leverage them best.

This is a quick, top-level review to review the new features of the platform and addresses the first questions one might have when considering an upgrade.

Please fill out the form to receive a copy of the FileMaker 19 Executive Summary.

Table of Contents

Release Cycles

The FileMaker 19 Platform

FileMaker Pro

• JavaScript Add-ons
• Artificial Intelligence
• Other Developer Niceties & Gotchas

FileMaker Go 19

• Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning
• Siri Shortcuts
• NFC scanning

FileMaker Server 19

• Admin Console Admin API and Admin
• CLI Data
• Restoration and Better Parallel Processing

Data API v2

Summing Up the FileMaker 19 Platform

In this collection of videos, we help to familiarize you with the features and capabilities of Carafe for deploying JavaScript packages to your FileMaker solution.

Learn about FileMaker 18's new features and functionality by downloading our executive summary, written by Wim Decorte.

Get it for free ...

What is Carafe?

Carafe is an open platform for working with JavaScript in FileMaker.

It allows you to browse, deploy, create, and/or share JavaScript components in FileMaker.

Ever since the advent of the Web Viewer, JavaScript has been a native language in FileMaker.

In the early days, intrepid pioneers in the FileMaker developer community worked out techniques for bi-directional signaling between the Web Viewer and the script engine, allowing full interactivity between JavaScript running in a Web Viewer and the rest of the FileMaker platform.

At this year’s DevCon in Dallas, TX, I presented a session on FileMaker and IoT (Internet of Things); in preparing for it I settled on this definition of IoT:

"The Internet of Things is the integration of people, processes and technology with connectable devices and sensors to enable remote monitoring, status, manipulation, and evaluation of trends of such devices...”

— Peter T. Lewis, 1985

Based on that definition and the highlighted core elements, I split up the DevCon session into two parts:

Collecting sensor data and sending it to FileMaker Server through the Data API; and 

Manipulate the environment by driving motors based on data retrieved from FileMaker Server.

Explore this serie with Soliant Consulting

With FileMaker 17 comes a variety of new features and capabilities. Watch our video to learn more about the platform’s new Master Detail functionality.

Generating PDFs in FileMaker

FileMaker Pro has had the ability to generate PDF documents since version 8, providing basic functionality that has remained largely unchanged since its introduction.

Using FileMaker Pro’s plugin architecture, we can extend this functionality to provide the following enhancements:

• Search PDF document text
• Append multiple PDF documents in non-sequential order
• Add a watermark to a PDF document
• Password protect a PDF document
• Delete pages from a PDF document
• Add clickable “Page Links” to move to different pages throughout a PDF document
• Compress a PDF file to prepare them for transmission over the internet

An intermediate to advanced FileMaker Pro developer can leverage these features to create even more dynamic PDF documents inside FileMaker Pro.

Read more on Soliant post

Pivot table reporting is very difficult to do in FileMaker.

The process requires a complex combination of portals or repeating fields, ExecuteSQL, and sometimes calc fields.

It’s a tough report to build, and many of our clients request export features to manipulate their data within Excel and build a pivot table externally.

That’s quite a few steps just to see your data.

Fortunately, we’ve uncovered a method to creating a pivot table directly in FileMaker through a PivotTable.js integration, simplifying and speeding up the process.

Explore our demo of its key functionality to learn how to implement the integration in your own FileMaker implementation.

AutoEnter Live is a virtual two-day event created for the Claris community.

You can expect to see a few familiar faces in our keynote and other sessions as well!

To drive creative collaboration, attendees are invited to join the discussion in real-time online for a truly unique learning experience.

There are many ways to customize WebDirect, a part of the FileMaker Platform that enables access to custom applications authored in FileMaker Pro via a compatible web browser.

This is appealing for several reasons, including a zero-configuration client allowing for the commoditization of client computing requirements of your workforce.

While this is not meant to be an exhaustive list of the options to customize WebDirect, I would like to share just a few techniques that I have worked on recently.

Because of the rich UI experiences which JavaScript provides within a web browser, it makes sense to take advantage of the various possibilities.

The difficulty may be putting all the pieces together in order to get something working correctly.

Fortunately, JavaScript isn't just for those "other developers". Those who already know what they're doing.

You too, can easily integrate and use JavaScript within your own solutions.

You simply need to be ready to learn enough in order to integrate successfully.

You need to be a JavaScript integrator.

When you're comfortable with getting data in and out of FileMaker, then you're able to have all those rich experiences which are found within the world of the web browser.

An open source project named Carafe, created by Jeremiah Small, and released by Soliant in April of 2019, has provided a very easy way to integrate various JavaScript resources.

...

... Soliant created Carafe, an open source package manager for implementing JavaScript libraries in FileMaker.

It comes with a number of pre-written bundles like Google Maps and Data Tables.

It’s simple to add these features to your application

... Read more on Soliant blog post

File Foundation Built for You

At the core of the FileMaker templates, you’ll find a solid, consistent design, clean look, and strategic user interface and user experience.

Look under the hood and you’ll find much of the same.

That wasn’t by accident.

Our team spent a great deal of time determining how these apps should look, how they should flow, and most importantly, how to develop them.

Unlike starter solutions, these files are meant to be dissected, understood, learned from, and actually built upon.

I’d like to go into some detail about some of the best practices we hit on as we worked through our design and development process for them.

Read more on Soliantconsulting post ...

With FileMaker 17 comes a variety of new features and capabilities.

Watch our video to learn more about customizing the platform’s Master Detail functionality.

With the release of FileMaker 17 comes a variety of new features and capabilities for both users and developers.

Learn about how to customize and leverage new default fields in your solution here.

Connecting Your WordPress Website and FileMaker Solution

In this post, we demonstrate how you can submit a form built with a freely available WordPress plugin, Ninja Forms.

This makes building web forms easy while staying compliant with a WordPress theme.

This process also supports responsiveness of your WordPress deployment.