Perhaps one of the most asked questions that I see asked on the FileMaker Cafe is in regards to join tables. While some users have an understanding of what they are, they may lack the FileMaker skills to implement them. Others are unfamiliar with the concept altogether, but will explain their real word example. Usually it is a prime candidate for a join table. This article provides a real world example that will give you an understanding of why join tables are important, and in what circumstances they should be used. The example will then be implemented in a simple FileMaker solution…

FileMaker provides us with the ability to create related records directly from a portal. This is a great and easy way to generate records without the need to script the process, and for that reason it is a popular technique among both new users and Developers alike. This article extends this concept further and suggests various user interface improvements for making data entry in this method more user friendly…

In part one, we built a couple of basic conditional value lists to select sport names & equipment items. Part two demonstrated how the conditional value lists could be tweaked for use within a portal. The last part in the series gives some basic techniques to help the selection process from your drop-downs, and ensure that the chosen values remain consistent and correct…

Part two in this three-part series deals with constructing conditional value lists that are to be used within a portal. In part one, the conditional value lists built were for use on a single record on a layout. Portals however may contain many rows, each row being a record with it's own field values…

With the introduction of script triggers in FileMaker 10, live filtering or portals was made possible. Numerous techniques were introduced to help achieve this. In conjunction with existing filtering techniques, the "Live" aspect was achieved usually by introducing an OnObjectModify script trigger to the filter entry field. As soon as the user enters a value into the field, the triggered script would force a save of the fields contents, thus updating the relationship in question, which in turn updated results in a portal on screen…

In versions of FileMaker prior to 11, working with the Import Records mappings dialog was easy. You could very quickly select and deselect all mappings by selecting all fields and then clicking one of the arrow mapping icons between any two fields in the mapping…

Here is a nice quick technique that will allow you to place a layout object or objects into more than one tab on any given tab control object, without actually duplicating the object for each tab...

This is a quick and simple tip for keeping your layouts tidy from the clutter that merge fields can produce…

A sub-summary report, is a special kind of report where records are grouped together by a specified field known as the "break" field (because it acts as a break between groups of similar records). Normally, the break between parts happens above your records, but there is a way in which to have the break "appear" to be beside your records instead…

The count function allows you to produce a count of the number of records through a relationship. However what may be less clear is that in order to achieve this, every record must be downloaded to the client computer, making the process very slow over a wide area connection. There is, however, an alternative to count in this situation which is almost instantaneous, this article explains how...