Oct. 25 – Working with and Extending the Starter Solutions

Thank you all for joining us on Oct. 25 when we discussed the FileMaker starter solutions, enhancing and integrating them.  We had excellent attendance and a lot of great questions!  We are attaching the sample files below and the video of the presentation is available as well for those of you that missed it.

We had a lot of great questions at this event so we’re going to answer them here for those of you who missed the answers live:

Q1: How do you make an Image a button?

• Enter layout mode
• Select Insert a Picture from the menus
• Locate the image to insert on the layout and insert it
• Resize it and place it in the correct location
• Right-click on the image and select Button Setup
• Assign the action to the image

Q2: Why did you create a second instance of the Customer Table in the Invoices File?

The first Table Occurrence (TO) of the Customer table was placed to show all the related people in a company.  The second TO is to relate the Ship-to contact of an invoice to the Customer table.  Each TO is for a specific relationship, either to show all related people or a specific person.

Remember a TO is like a shortcut or alias to the table, you will typically have more than one TO for each table depending on context.

Q3: When creating the value list for the ShipToID, you selected ‘show values from second field only’.  Since the NAME gets entered into the ShiptoID (a number field) doesn’t this interfere with the fields relationship with the parent file?

The Value List options only effect the display of data, not the underlying data.   Try this test:

• Put the ShiptoID field on a layout twice.
• For one copy of the field, leave it as a text box.
• The second copy of the field, change the appearance of the field to a pop-up menu.
• Select a Customer from the pop-up menu on the second field.  Note that the first field will show the customer ID number and the second will show the name.  The second field follows the value list and displays the second field value even though the actual data is the ID number.

Q4: What is an X relationship?

An X Join, also called a Cartesian relationship, relates any record in the first table to all the records in the second table.

Q5: Where can I get the UltraLog you spoke about?

Right Here!

Thank you again, Everyone!  Here are the sample files and video:

Sample Files