Every new software release cause for celebration and reassessment. There are always new features that make your working life easier. But even change for the good is stressful since you can’t (at least you shouldn’t) keep doing everything the old way. The upgrade to FileMaker Go 14 is no different. Here are four reasons your mobile life is about to get better.
Automatic reconnection
Improved performance
Android support
Signature screen
Automatic Reconnection in FileMaker Go 14
If your connection gets dropped, FileMaker Server can now interact with Filemaker Go to re-open the database, and remember what you were doing when you got interrupted. You may need to log back in (depending on your database’s reauthorization settings), but you won’t have to re-create found sets and active records after you do. When we were testing this feature in preparation for writing FileMaker Pro 14: The Missing Manual, this process was so seamless that we wouldn’t haven’t noticed the dropped connection if we hadn’t been the ones causing it.
True, this feature isn’t limited to FileMaker Go. Anybody who opens a database from a FileMaker Server 14 server will benefit from automatic reconnection. But mobile folks will appreciate it more since they’re often using the database in front of customers or in other situations where disconnections are extra stressful. This way, recovery is more forgiving.
Improved Performance
Here’s another area where improvements to FileMaker Server give a better experience for end-users. The engineering team heard the cries for better performance and dedicated lots of time to making sure that FileMaker Server can handle more Go/WebDirect connections without bogging down. This is critical for wider adoption of FileMaker Go and WebDirect. Although the technology was amazing at delivering FileMaker on mobile or on the web, it was underwhelming, even disappointing, for users who needed to get work done on a tight schedule. Some early adopters were so disappointed that their early databases didn’t gain wide deployment after launch because of their inefficiency.
The good news is that early tests show 2-3x speed increases over Server 13—even when the Server 14 box has fewer cores and less RAM! That means much better performance for small user bases. Even larger deployments will benefit since those same tests indicate that operations that caused a Server 13 deployment to choke at 15 users can sail along with twice the number of users.
Android Support
Some folks who absolutely had to have access to their FileMaker databases on Android devices have been willing to risk using an unsupported technology. Others found the performance buggy or worse and felt left out in the cold. Those days are gone with official support for Android. You’ll need Chrome 38 or later to meet the official tech specs.
Signature Screen
The Insert from Device script step now includes a Signature Options dialog box where you can specify a Title, Message, and Prompt for the signature capture window on FileMaker Go. Each one lets you include static or dynamic text (through the Specify Calculation dialog box). Now when you hand your device over to a customer or client for their signature, they’ll see instructions in context with their signature. This little bit of polish goes a long way toward making a good impression on your users, and on the people they’re serving.
FileMaker has always had a special place in the world of software. Its legendary ease-of-use is aimed at letting people gather and manage their data without needing to understand geeky topics. So it makes sense that most upgrades have focused on features that are readily apparent to end users. But FileMaker Pro 14 may be the first upgrade that has more to delight developers’ hearts more than end users’.
That’s not to say that end users don’t benefit. FileMaker’s engineering team always knew that FMP 13’s WebDirect technology was a 1.0 release. It was amazing how well it worked, but all those features came at a cost to performance that some users found frustrating. So the great gift to end users is the fine-tuning of FileMaker Server for increased performance. We’ll see some real world figures drifting in over the next few days and weeks, but before release some folks were reporting a 2-3x speed increase in some operations.
Plus, the new Standby Server feature lets you create a second server that can nearly seamlessly take over in case your primary server fails. Neither of these are glamorous features, but they’re the kind of trust-building upgrades a mature software platform has to provide in the competitive world of database apps.
Features to Make Your Developer’s Heart Sing
As with any upgrade, many features are improvements to old standbys. So you can expect the usual influx of new functions (like a suite that lets you control media playback in container fields), and improvements in existing features. But by far, the biggest change, and the one that will inspire the most love—and maybe the most initial frustration—is the ground-up redesign of the old-school Edit Scripts window.
Script Workspace
FileMaker 14’s new Script Workspace is long-awaited upgrade to script writing. All the functions of two dialog boxes have been combined into the new workspace and the menus. Most interactions with the workspace can be issued through the keyboard, instead of the mouse. You can also choose steps’ option with the keyboard — for the most part. Instead of secondary dialog boxes, most options are entered from a popover right in the Edit Script pane. This improvement will lead to faster script writing that’s more like code writing in other platforms. The Script Workspace also includes line numbers to make finding and reading specific sections of your code easier. A new Description area (under the Steps list) will save trips to the Help file if you need a short reminder about what a step is used for.
As welcome as these changes are, the new workflow takes some getting used to. Since you can still point and click, some folks won’t notice the change right way. That’s a good thing for the change-resistant, but it does tend to put the Script Workspace’s light under a bushel.
The timesaving features of the Script Workspace are also ported to the Specify Calculation window. Select functions by typing, and setup calculations or specify options with keyboard controls. Just start typing the name of your function, and a popover list of functions whose names match your typing appear. When you see the function you need, use the Up or Down arrow keys to select it, and then press Enter. If the function takes parameters, you can just start typing them to see another list.
The popover list of matching functions also includes table and field names. You can enter even the longest fully-qualified field name with just a few keystrokes. For example, if you want to add a reference to the Estimate::Date field, do this:
Type “e,” then press the Down arrow to select Estimate (your table’s name) from the list.
Press Enter. “Estimate::” is entered into your calculation. The list automatically shows the fields from Estimate table.
Use the arrow keys or type a “d” to select the Date field. Press Enter again, and the field reference is complete.
This is one of those shortcuts that takes way longer to describe than to do. And as with the Script Workspace, this keyboard driven assembly will take some getting used to. But after a few hours of practice, you’ll wonder how you ever put up with mouse-based scripting and calculation writing.
Heaven help us all during the switchover period when we’re working in both FileMaker 13 and 14.
Navigation Tools
A new Navigation layout part and the new Button Bar tool lets you create modern navigation bars that float at the top of your layout no matter how far you scroll.
Navigation Parts
There are actually two versions of this new layout part: Top Navigation and Bottom Navigation. Like Headers and Footers, they anchor to the top or bottom of your layouts. Navigation parts don’t print by default, so they behave the way you’d expect them to right out of the box. These parts can’t be scrolled or zoomed, and if you throw a field in one of them, the data from the current record is shown. You can only have one of each part on a layout, but you can create sophisticated navigation systems by putting your main navigation in a Top Nav part, and your context sensitive buttons, or a lower level navigation in a Bottom Nav part.
Button Bars
The new Button Bar tool lets you create several related buttons at one time. Each segment behaves like an individual button and can have its own script or script step attached. You can even mix buttons and popovers in a button bar. So even though FileMaker still doesn’t have templates or master pages, now you can create a navigation or context-sensitive button bar and copy/paste the whole bar to a new layout. This will be another huge timesaver for making your database’s interface more consistent and professional-looking. Here are some other ways Button Bars will make your life easier:
Button Bars re-size as one unit, so they’ll behave better than single buttons when windows are re-sized.
Button Bars can have calculated names. That way you can use one bar on layouts used by users with different roles. Your script can check for privilege set before deciding which action to take, and now the button that runs it can display different text to help orient (or train) users.
All segments of a bar share the same style, which makes consistency easier and more fool-proof (you can’t forget to apply a style to one segment, for example).
Segments can have their own individual conditional formats.
Segments can have their own script triggers.
Segments can be hidden with the “Hide object when” option.
These two navigation improvements don’t stop with making development more efficient. Knowing that you can use Navigation Parts and Button Bars can help you think more clearly about your database’s organization before you even open FileMaker to define your first table. Try sketching out navigation along with your ER diagrams and you’ll start to see how quickly your thinking about how a database will function becomes more clear.
Button Improvements
Even without the new Button Bar, Button handling has been upgraded to let you add text or an icon, or a combination of both. When you display both, you can even choose how the two elements relate to each other—you can put text above or below the icon, or to the right or left of the icon. The Button Setup dialog box comes loaded with a set of icons (called Glyphs) that you can choose. Once you’ve selected an icon, you can resize it with the slider that sits just below the glyph window.
Glyphs appear grey in the dialog box, but are black on the button by default. But you don’t have to live with that color. Glyphs have their own object state. Once you have all the options set in the Button Setup window, travel over to the Inspector, click the Appearance tab, and then change the top object state pop-up to Button: Icon. That’s where you change the glyph’s color to match your color scheme.
If none of the default icons meet your needs, you can add your own custom glyphs, as long as they’re PNG or SVG format. Use the “+” button under the glyph window to import the file.
Note that button glyphs are more than just a convenience. Early testing indicates that glyphs help your layouts render faster than text used as icons (say if you used a “+” symbol from your keyboard instead of the glyph).
Minimalist Styles
FileMaker’s styles are useful for that quick and dirty database you need to throw together in a few hours. But most professional developers create their own custom styles that matches their clients’ branding (or their own). It’s a huge amount of work changing a mature style since every single style—along with all their object states—have to be updated. New themes, called Minimalist and Minimalist Touch, start out with no pre-defined styles except the Default style for each object type. That way, there are no styles to re-define or re-name and no unused custom styles to delete. Just start creating the styles you need.
That old bane Classic style is no longer included in new files you create with FileMaker 14. But you’ll still see it if you convert an old file, either from pre-12 version that had no styles to begin with, or one that created back when Classic was a thing.
FileMaker Go Script Steps
You’ll have more control over your users’ FileMaker Go experience with a few new script steps:
Set Allowed Orientations lets you limit screen flip on those layouts that you design not to rotate.
Enable Touch Keyboard lets you enable, or more importantly, disable the touch keyboard. This steps works on FileMaker Go and under Windows 8 touchscreens.
What features are you looking forward to using? Leave a comment or question below.
The new FileMaker 14 Platform provides the most complete and flexible experience across iPad, iPhone, Windows, Mac and the web. Millions of people worldwide rely on the FileMaker Platform to share customer information, manage projects, track assets, and more.
Sample FileMaker Pro 14 database for your desktop
What’s In It For You?
There’s lots to love, whether you’re a new user, an old hand with a mature FileMaker database, or a custom developer.
New Users
Transform your business with the FileMaker Platform. You can quickly create and run custom solutions that work seamlessly across iPad, iPhone, Windows, Mac, and the web — no programming skills needed. Millions of people worldwide rely on the FileMaker Platform to share customer information, manage projects, track assets, and more.
Upgraders
Upgraders will enjoy the same great consistency of experience across platforms. And the new FileMaker 14 Platform provides plenty of features meant to make your database faster and more efficient. FileMaker Server has been optimized to give you your data faster over the Web and on FileMaker Go, plus a new Standby Server feature can protect you from downtime in case of hardware failure. If you’re developing your own solutions, you’ll love the features focused on helping you create a custom solution that lets you focus on your work.
Custom Developers
The new Script Workspace gives you more power and lets you work more efficiently. The redesigned Specify Calculation dialog box uses a similar interface that gives you keyboard power. Two new layout tools—Navigation layout parts and Button Bars—let you create modern apps that perform the way you expect them to. See our review for details.
The new Script Workspace in FileMaker Pro 14 delivers on some long-asked for developer features, like color coding, more keyboard access, and a unified interface. But like any new feature, it’ll take some getting used to before you’re fluent with the new workflow. Here are some tips for keeping your sanity while you’re upping your scripting game.
Understanding the Script Workspace
The old Manage Scripts window showed a list of scripts and helped you manage them with buttons for creating new scripts and organizing tools like separators and folders. You’d open a new window to work on a specific script, and you could open as many of these Edit Script windows as you needed. Now all those tasks happen in the same window, called Script Workspace.
Figure 1. The Script Workspace now has all the features and tools that used to be distributed over two different dialog boxes. Your main task will be to figure out where your favorite tools have gone.
All the features you’re used to are still available, you just access them differently. Figure 1 shows the new Script Workspace. The left hand pane shows a list of all your scripts. They’re arranged as you would have seen them in FileMaker 13, complete with their folders, separators and menu states. The three tools at the top of the Scripts pane let you manage the list. From left to right, these tools:
toggle the checkboxes you use to put a script in the Scripts menu
create a folder
create a separator
If you click a script, it’ll open in the middle pane. When you have multiple scripts open, they’re arranged in tabs across the top of the pane. You’ll learn some tips for editing scripts later in this article.
Script steps are shown in the right pane. For new users, the handiest feature is the Description box at the bottom, which gives you info about the selected script. You can filter the list of steps with the search field at the top of the list. Tools at the top of the Steps pane let you mark your favorite steps, so that they appear in a special section at the top, and organize the list alphabetically or grouped by function.
The buttons at the upper left of the Script Workspace lets you create new scripts, run the selected script, and start the Debugger (if you have FileMaker Pro Advanced). Buttons in the upper right show script steps’ compatiblity, toggle the Scripts pane, and toggle the Steps pane.
If some of your favorite features seem to be missing, take a look at the menus.
Many of these commands are available through other means in the Script Workspace, like New Script, New Folder, and others. But Grant Full Access Privileges (formerly a checkbox at the bottom of the old Edit Script dialog box) is only available from the Scripts menu.
Don’t forget the View menu, which also changes context when the Script Workspace is active. Again, most of the commands are available directly in the workspace. But the bottom command, called Syntax Coloring, is where you can customize the color coding that makes it easier to read your scripts at a glance.
Syntax Coloring
By default, script steps are now numbered and color coded. To understand what the colors mean, take a look at the Syntac Coloring dialog box shown below.
Figure 3. The Syntax Coloring dialog box (shown in a Script Workspace with the Script and Steps panes closed) lets you customize the default colors that appear in the Edit Scripts pane.
Script Flow refers to the script steps found under the Control section of the Steps pane. (Well, most of them: Set Variable, Set Layout Object, and Install OnTimer Script don’t get colored.) They’re the steps you use to perform logical tests, branching, looping, calling subscripts, and other meta functions. By default, those steps are shown in blue.
Disabled and Incompatible script steps are shown in light grey by default. Green steps are comments (text notes that don’t perform any action). Note that the blank spaces in the script shown here are just comment steps with no text. One really nice improvement is that blank comments no longer show the # sign at the left. It’s cleaner — now your scripts’ white space really is a resting point that makes your script easier to read — plus it’s more like other scripting environments. Finally references to schema are shown in purple.
You’re free to change the custom colors any way you want, but the default colors are mostly pretty good. They stand out well from the main code and aren’t too similar to one another. The only exception to that is that Disabled and Incompatible steps are both a light grey color. It’s true that neither item will run when the script is executed, but you may prefer to see a little more warning for incompatible steps, like the orange color shown in Figure 3.
Using the Keyboard
Once you get past the rearranged furniture in the new Script Workspace, you could use it almost the same way as the old, two-dialog box model. That is, if you’re just getting started learning to script, you may depend on the step list to remind you what commands are available for scripting. And once you find what you need, you can point and click to add steps and set their options.
But the real power of the new setup is the keyboard shortcuts you can use instead of your mouse. You can’t throw away your mouse completely, but the new Workspace gets us a long way toward the nirvana of typing code manually. Here’s a list of handy keyboard shortcuts for writing scripts without the mouse:
Enter or Return key. If no steps are selected, the Enter or Return key adds a new line at the bottom of your script. If a step is selected, the new line appears below the highlighted step. Shift + Enter/Return adds the new line above the highlighted step.
Use the Up and Down arrow keys to move the highlight through the script.
Hold the Shift key with the Up/Down arrows to select multiple, contiguous lines.
Move selected script steps with Command + Ctrl + Up (or Down) arrow keys.
The curly braces let you move through the open script tabs in the Edit Script pane. Command + { moves to the next tab, and Command + } moves to the previous tab on the Mac. Use the Ctrl keys instead on Windows.
Close a Script tab with Command + W (Mac) or Ctrl + W (Windows).
To add a step to your script, create a new line and then start typing the step’s name.
Did you get the importance of that last item? You can add steps to a script just by typing! This is probably the most important upgrade in FileMaker Pro 14 because of the time it will save developers by typing instead of reaching for a mouse. Here’s how it works: once you start typing in a new line, a popover list appears showing all the steps that match your text. So if you want to add a Set Field step, create a new line and then type “set f.” A list appears below the new line, and it’s filtered by what you type.
Once the step you need appears on the list, use the arrow keys to highlight it, and then hit the Enter key to add it to your script. Then hit Enter again to show the step’s options. Use the Spacebar to option an option’s dialog box. When a step has more than one option (for example, the Set Field step has a Specify target field option and a Calculated result option), use the Up/Down arrow keys to move between options. When you’re done setting all a step’s options, you can de-select it with the Escape key, or by creating a new line.
But maybe you think the typing “set f” is too much work. Then you can type the first letters of the name of the step you need. In other words, type “sf” and the list is filtered to show all steps that have any words that begin with both an “s” and an “f” and in that order (Constrain Found Set has words that start with “s” and “f,” but it won’t appear in the list because “Found” comes before “Set” in this step). This rule is harder to explain than to understand. But for those steps you use often, like Go To Related Record or an If test, you’ll soon be typing away without thinking about it.
It’ll take some practice to get all these tricks to become second nature. But most experienced developers report that they’re already writing scripts much more quickly than they used to, and that they’re not nearly as efficient when they have to work in FileMaker Pro 13.
Disabling script steps
The Workspace giveth and the Workspace taketh away. Several of standby favorite commands aren’t nearly as accessible as they used to be. For instance, you can still disable script steps, but it’s gonna take you a while to find the command. Select the step(s) you want to disable, and then choose Edit > Disable. Reverse the process to enable a step.
Fortunately, there’s a keyboard shortcut you can use instead. On the Mac, Command + / (forward slash) toggles your highlighted steps. Use Control + / on Windows.
Note: If you can’t find this command, you may be working with FileMaker Pro. Disabling script steps is one of the developer tools in FileMaker Pro Advanced.
