Got white space? Here is a FileMaker custom function that hides the portal scroll bar if there are no additional records to display. This is the first post in a series on building a different kind of FileMaker-based contact management solution that looks and behaves like the OS X Address Book.

Seasoned and aspiring FileMaker ninjas will want to have this free utility in their tool belts. Syntax highlighting, code snippets, documentation, and even direct access to FileMaker's clipboard!

One of the primary tools we have available to us when designing user interfaces is color. Adding some categorization to your data using a little color can make it much more approachable and usable. The technique presented here will give you (on Mac OS X) a polished and robust Color Picker with no other requirements than a custom function and a global field. You can even set the default colors displayed on the Color Picker.

ValueCount ( FilterValues ( lst ; value ) )

 

Ben Miller and I came up with this tiny little function to tell us how many times a specific value occurs in a list. It’s smart enough to consider full values (carriage-return delimited), rather than partial text strings.

If you’re working with data from outside of FileMaker, you’ll commonly have to work with dates that FileMaker’s GetAsDate function won’t understand. To handle this, I created a custom function that allows conversion of a wide variety of date formats.

Some examples of how the function works:

I’ve probably written a hundred render_not_found methods in my life as a Rails dev. Usually they just render a static file under /public, and maybe, if I’m feeling nice, give an XML response. No more!