Useful hints, tips and tricks for FileMaker Developers
If you are constantly using the zoom buttons to change your database view, do not click the reverse zoom buttons several times to go back to 100% (default) view.
All you have to do is click the numbered button on the bottom-left of the screen, wether it says 25, 150, or whatever. It will bring your zoom level back to 100% with one button click.
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If for some reason you ever want to insert the current date or the current time into a FileMaker database, in either layout or browse mode, instead of manually typing it out all you have to do is press Control + Dash for the date and Control and Semi-Colon for the current time.
It is a hard coded value and won’t update as the date and time changes, so it can be useful for storing dates of events to look back on for example.
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When editing a layout you can soon have so many different buttons, fields or text etc that it can be hard to find something when you want to make a mass change, for example change the font of all fields.
Well you can press Control + Shift + A (Command + Option + A on Mac) to select all similar layout objects, so you select any one field, press the hotkey and then all the fields on the layout will be selected for you to easily make any change to them all you want.
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Have you ever wanted some layout items to be vertical or upside down? All you have to do is add the text, field, button etc as normal and then select Rotate from the Arrange menu, or from the right click context menu of the layout item and it will be switch between the available rotations.
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Here is a useful custom function to return the suffix for a day in a month, for example if you pass it 1, it will return st, which you can append to make up a text representation of a date, eg 1st May etc.
| Function Name: | NumberSuffix | |
| Function Parameters: | Number | |
| Function Code | ||
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Let( [ |
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| Example Input: | 22 | |
| Example Output: | nd | |
| Example Usage: | $suffix = NumberSuffx(22) |
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Have you ever been deleting a few records in a FileMaker database and got annoyed but constantly clicking Delete on the confirmation dialog?
Well if you are sure you want to delete a record and don’t want the confirmation, you can just hold down the Shift key (Option key on Mac) when clicking delete and hey presto! No confirmation, the record will be deleted instantly.
But be careful, ‘With great power comes great responsibility!’
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