The old fmcollective

Web Application Frameworks

Ruby On Rails is gaining quite a bit of attention. I am personally attracted to its PHP cousins like cakePHP and Code Ignitor. FileMaker developers should be keeping an eye out on these emerging web application frameworks. These frameworks are tackling the 600 lb problem of automagic mapping of objects to relational databases.

In FileMaker land, we take much of this object-relational mapping for granted particularly in applications that use flatter structures.

Looks like I have a post brewing about the problem of mapping objects to FileMaker databases. Stay tuned.

Object-Influenced Design & FileMaker Pro

If you didn't get a chance to see Corn Walker's DevCon presentation this year, you've missed out on an important foray into a topic close to my heart, Object Oriented (influenced) design and FileMaker Pro. Corn really gets into the "how". I am simply going to introduce the main concepts below. Hopefully I can persuade him to extend this discussion with a treatise of his own after he has put with his treehouse-building adventures behind.

First, when I talk about object-orientation, I am speaking of a way to think about your database application from a design perspective. This isn't primarily about how you write scripts or "program" in FileMaker Pro. Rather, object orientation is the starting point of good application design.

Functional Specifications Howto

Allen Smith of mojofat has written a wonderfully concise yet and useful tutorial on how to write a functional specification. It is a bit web-centric but I think it applies nicely to any application design process, particularly those that are information centric.

A Few Tidbits From The Under The Hood Sessions

As i promised in the earlier post "What I Learned At DEVCON" here are a few tidbits from the 2 Under the Hood sessions plus the Server Admin Under The Hood done by the SE's and Server Team.

1. Do not continue to use recovered files.

2. The best CPU for FileMaker Server, especially if using Server Advanced, is a "medium powered" dual processor machine with 10K RPM SCSI drives.  Use RAID where needed.

3. Be sure to turn off Disk Indexing and Shadow Copy and enable data throughput for network apps, not file services.

4. Nested or multiply referenced unstored calculations will result in many dependency re-evaluations and affect performance.  Use Let function to prevent multiple re-evaluations.

5. FileMaker Servers should be rebooted at least once a week.

6. FileMaker Server is highly dependent on the underlying OS of the Server.

7. Do not activate automatic updates (Server patches, etc.)  Automatic notification is OK, but do not install automatically as they require reboots that can cause problems for the files.

8. For the most part with modern CPU's, set the server cache to the maximum amount and the flush interval to 1 minute. (Besides if the processor can't handle 13 to 15MB flush per second to the drive, then you got other issues anyway.)

9. Segment the drives or use multiple drives for Server. OS on drive 1; data on drive 2; backups on drive 3.

10. Index is specific to the data type in FMP.  And for all data types data are stored as compressed Unicode.

Steven H. Blackwell

What I Learned At DEVCON

What I Learned At DEVCON

The 11th FileMaker Developer Conference concluded the other day.  It was held in Orlando, Florida, this year at a venue leagues improved from its last East Coast outing in 2001.

I learned quite a few things at this DEVCON, and I thought I’d share some of them, in no particular order of significance.

1. Developers voted with their feet and chose workshops rather than more formalized sessions except for the three “Under the Hood” ones.  This is no surprise to those in the developer community. Several of the workshops were oversubscribed by factors of 150% to 200%, even while some formal sessions were 75% empty.  Special kudos to Chris Moyer for doing an unanticipated v-rev of his workshop when he had to turn away over 100 folks from the first version.

2. The three “Under The Hood” sessions done by various of the engineers were excellent, and they imparted a good deal of useful information. And I will excerpt some of that in a separate entry.

3. Andy Gaunt of FMPUG fame is possibly the greatest showman since the late Phineas T. Barnum.  His FileMaker Excellence Award is also extraordinarily well–deserved.  See http://www.fmpug.com

4. The unfortunate theft of a laptop computer during the conference lead to detailed discussions of laptop and software security. Laptop computers are attractive items to steal. This is very bad for their owners. Such computers need multiple layers of protection for their contents and for their FileMaker Pro databases, including strong OS-level passwords and hardening and strong FileMaker Pro-level Accounts and passwords.

5. There appears to be an infinite variety of ways to serve chicken at conference meal functions, save only Southern fried.  The latter style is, of course, the one much beloved from a childhood in the mountains of East Tennessee and the one most longed for today.

6. Several FileMaker, Inc. Engineers and Product Managers could give up their careers in the software industry and become highly successful emcees of television shows or comedians in nightclubs.  Some of these guys are really funny,  and they are really good performers.

7. Some conference organizers cannot correctly count the number of conferences held over time.  On the other hand, an Exacto knife and a strip of clear tape can convert a 10 year badge to an 11 year badge, proving that the Village Elder can still improvise when needed.

8. I think I am a very honest fellow with the ability to safeguard all manner of (sometimes very highly) confidential information.  That said, and even when other people agree with my glowing opinion of my own trustworthiness, I doubt that many developers would just walk up and give me their server administrative passwords, email passwords, PIN numbers, and similar information.  I doubt they would even if they know that I can be trusted with this information.  Given that, why then did some people broadcast that very same information in clear text over an unsecured wireless network and make it susceptible to interception by some war zoner who could have been sitting outside in the guest parking lot? If they weren’t using a VPN or some method of encryption, their Account Names and passwords could have been intercepted.

9. A lightening strike on a conference center is not conducive to the proper and effective functioning of switches and Internet connections.  Nor apparently does it enhance the ability of technically trained personnel from the relevant ISP to repair them and restore Internet access functionality in a reliable fashion.  In the information security profession we refer to a concept called “defense–in–depth” that provides overlapping and redundant defenses against various threats.  Perhaps this concept ought travel over to the ISP community in Orlando as well.

10. Finally, there is supersonic.  And there is also hypersonic. And then there is Andrew LeCates, Senior Director of System Engineers.  Even if you can only catch every tenth word of a LeCates presentation, it’s still worth more than every word of 99 percent of other presentations.  There will be a special pre-DEVCON Seminar in 2007 on Hyper Listening techniques.  Andrew LeCates is beyond a treasure to the FileMaker Developer community; he is beyond a core asset.  He is the true linchpin.

Steven H. Blackwell

Portal row locking "detail" pop-up window

Reprint of a post from May, 2004 before the days of FileMaker 8.x. Might still be a useful reference.

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I ran into an odd problem while working on my project management application in FileMaker 7. In one of my views, I have a portal in which the fields are enterable and editable "inline". You'll see in my picture that I have included a button that pops up a small detail window that shows users more details about that portal row and allows them to edit and add additional data to that portal row.

The crux of the problem is this. If you are "sitting" in a field in a portal row and then click the button (the blue plus sign) which does a "GTRR" (go to related record) of displaying it in a new, smaller window, you'll run into a record lock that prevents you from editing the record in the detail view because the lock from the referring window hasn't been released. If, however, we release that lock by committing the record BEFORE we do our GTRR, we'll lose the focused portal row and wind up going to the wrong related record (actually, always the first related record).

Solution
The idea is to be able to commit our record but still return to our portal row before doing our GTRR script. This is where script parameters come to our rescue. Pass the Get ( PortalRowNumber ) function as script parameter with that button. We can now safely commit the record, return to the portal row by the value of the script parameter and happily do our GTRR.

FileMakery, Part II

In Part I of FileMakery, I argue that FileMaker Pro's (FMP) value is primarily defined by what it does for working professionals and non-technical users; lose this aspect of FileMaker and the product ceases to be relevant to its user base. FileMaker Pro may not be quite the product that a segment of developers want, but I think that it is exactly the product that a large and traditionally under-served group of users needs.

But let me qualify this a bit. This isn't a critique about innovation on FileMaker Inc's (FMI) part. In many ways, the current generation of FileMaker (7/8) is inspired. FMI has done a lot of things right. In all the essential ways, FileMaker Pro is still easy to use, and some would argue that it is even easier now. On top of this, FMI has worked hard to break the technical limitations of the product and to gain credibility among the technical community. FMI appears to have addressed many of the principal IT objections that have threatened to take the product away from the hands of its loyal customers. With the addition of a much improved security framework and serious connectivity features, FMI has made real inroads in convincing IT that it can be a good corporate citizen.

FileMakery, Part I

I have been following Steven Blackwell's post and comments to it with keen interest. It touches on a pattern of FileMaker polemics I have been mulling over myself. There is a certain tension in the FileMaker community that is often framed in terms of competing philosophies: geek vs. regular-joe, theory versus practice, technical versus non-technical, relational design versus flat design and so on. It is the same tension that has some complaining that FileMaker Pro 8 is still not a sufficiently serious developer tool, and yet others lamenting how FileMaker has become too complex--that it has lost its way because it is now much more difficult to use.

Gladly Would He Teach, and Gladly Learn

I believe there is a fundamental question about how learning is going to have to be acquired in the future for the FileMaker community.  This is both a conceptual and an economic question. There are a lot of misimpressions about future learning in the FileMaker community; likewise, there is also a huge amount of self–denial. Some of these unreasonable expectations stem from the cultural background and history of the community:  in the early days it was largely a self-help, help-others approach.  People learned their way into FileMaker.  Those days are long since gone; a systematic approach to learning how to use these products and how they work together is needed.

Relational Theory Snake Oil Recovery

Two posts into this blog and already I have managed to bungle the job. Last night, with one eye cocked on Alias and another editing my own posts, I managed to delete Corn's excellent post on relational theory. This is inspite of TypePad's "ARE ABSOLUTELY SURE YOU WANT TO DELETE THIS POST warning". So, being a benevolent owner of blog hasn't stopped me from being occasionally unpredictable, particularly when I am distracted by fighting spy-chicks on TV.

If anyone has a copy of Corn's post and manages to recover it, please email me?