Learning Claris FileMaker

FileMaker is a very responsive application – you ask it to do something and it responds pretty quickly.

But sometimes, we want FileMaker to be more patient and wait until we’re done before it does something.

In effect, we want FileMaker to practice a bit of patience. We’re going to talk about pickers today, and […]

That’s what a picker lets you do. It gives you a simple interface – usually, a search field is used to filter the list, so you can narrow a list of 500 types of [whatever you’re looking for] down to just a few possibilities. This can make it much easier for a user to select the correct data to put into the field, especially when the list of possible choices is large or will grow over time.

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FileMaker introduced a very different kind of capability with the ExecuteSQL function.

First introduced in FileMaker 12, it allows you to perform “select” queries against your FileMaker data, as opposed to the more familiar “Find” functionality available in FileMaker.

SQL (Structured Query Language) is a standard used with other, more traditional, database servers. Using SQL, SELECTS on indexed data is blazing fast and efficient.

It allows you to construct relationships in SQL that do not necessarily exist in your application otherwise.

There have been many useful techniques that have been demonstrated since its introduction.

This post will detail and explain yet another technique of the ExecuteSQL function - Search as You Type.