I wouldn’t suggest that general users try this out, but developers and power users could used this to be able to multi task better. Up until now, we run a FileMaker Pro along with FileMaker Advanced to use FileMaker Pro to run a task / billing database. Now, we can just run another copy of FileMaker Advanced.

This is also a great idea to work on several databases simultaneously and to make copy and pasting of anything that resides in a modal  window.

To try it, open Terminal and run the following command: open -n /Applications/’FileMaker Pro 12 Advanced’/'FileMaker Pro Advanced.app’/

This can be used for any other app too like FileMaker Pro, Safari, or any other app that you need. Keep in mind to enclose and paths or file names in quotes if there are any spaces within the path.

To make it less painful, you can also turn that terminal command into an Automator script as shown below or just download the Spawn FM.app Automator script.

I thought so.

Recently, I learned that the MBS FileMaker Plugin could color code FileMaker scripts and calcs on Mac OS. Sorry Windows users… It’s amazing. Plus calculations are colorized. It’s something I just can’t live without now…

To try it for free:

• Download the plugin.
• Install the plugin, remembering to quit and relaunch FileMaker.
• Download and open the ‘fmSyntaxColorizer‘ database that I’ve already customized. I spent quite a bit of time deciding what colors to use for each script step type. Or open the ‘fmSyntaxColorizer’ in the Examples/Third Party folder in the download if you’d like to use the example that comes with the plugin.
• After opening the fmSyntaxColorizer, click the Colorize button. That’s unless you want to change the colors…
• Finally, order the MBS FileMaker Plugin. It’s well worth it JUST for the code coloring, but it can do sooo much more.

Christian from MBS is simply amazing. He responds extremely fast to requests. In fact, I was editing some scripts yesterday, color coded of course, and I went to debug a script and it was in black and white. So I popped him an email and within literally minutes, he sent me an updated plugin that color coded the script debugger.

I’ve been using the MBS Real Studio plugin for years and years for Real Studio projects. It’s essential. then a few years ago, Christian created the MBS FileMaker plugin which bring over some of the functionality of the Real Studio plugin, plus some special features just for FileMaker like code coloring, window controls like hiding, webviewer tool, and others.

More info: iClip and QuicKeys

Watch on YouTube

While the Keurig coffee is more expensive per cup than a regular coffee pot machine IF you don’t finish the entire pot, I never have to drink old coffee that’s been sitting on the burner for hours. We can almost always find k-cups for about 50 cents each. Plus it’s still cheaper than driving around for a $4 coffee.

Just like the tools we use to make FileMaker development faster like FMClips and FMSnippets I LOVE to make stuff around the house and our popup camping trailer better. For the coffee machine, I loved how it could make me a cup of coffee in seconds, every 5 for 6 cups, I had to keep filling the reservoir.

Ughhh. Take off the lid, carry to the fridge, hold it while it fills, then put it back. What a pain. So, just like the water line going to the fridge, I ran a line to the coffee machine with an on/off valve. That worked, but then I had to manually open and close rather than the parade to the fridge and back. Too much work, plus one time I didn’t close the valve and caused a minor flood, probably day dreaming about FileMaker…

Then I was thinking about how our toilet how it auto fills itself and thought that my coffee machine should do the same! So I bought a float valve that would fit in the reservoir. The idea is that every time I make a cup of coffee, it automatically refills the tank. I’ve been using it for weeks and it completely rocks. Unfortunately, I didn’t actually buy that float valve and had to use the adapter shown on the left next to the wall to deal with different hose sizes. One tip is to put a manual valve in the hose line and open it just enough to trickle water into the tank at a reasonable pace.

The 90° adapter on top was nice to keep the hose out of the way. I’m now thinking of getting one of those cord hiders to hide the hose, or maybe paint the hose black.

Before the video starts, David entered the nominal voltage on the left out of the view of the video which set the range of voltages from 488 to 509. Chances are, the voltage reading will be represented in the list of buttons. If not, buttons are provided to go back and forward. Worst case, the voltage can be entered manually by entering the numbers.

LOVE this cool pad for my MacBook Pro when I use it on my lap. Huge difference! http://j.mp/LapCoolPad

What does that mean? We’ll normally, to find a Contact’s phone number, you would:

1. Go to the Contact Layout
2. Enter find Mode
3. Go to the Contact name fields and enter their name.
4. Perform the Find
5. Then finally, get the Contact Phone number.

With the new ExecuteSQL function you can do this in one step:

1. ExecuteSQL ( "SELECT PhoneNumber FROM Contacts WHERE Name ='Hal Gumbert'" )

This is perfect when you need a bit of data and don’t really want to leave the layout that you are currently on. However, in the example above, if you rename the fields or table name the ExecuteSQL statement will stop working.

To fix that problem, you would pass in the field and table names in a function so FileMaker’s field and table name references stay intact. We like this format to make the code easier to read. If you have any ideas to make this even better comment below.

"<Record><Field>" &

ExecuteSQL (

"SELECT " &
FieldNameQuoted ( Contacts::PhoneNumber ) & " " &

"FROM " &
FieldTableNameQuoted ( Contacts::_ID ) & " " &

"WHERE " &
FieldNameQuoted ( Contacts::Name ) & "=?"

; "</Field><Field>" ; "</Field></Record>" ; "Hal Gumbert" ) &

"</Field></Record>"

There’s a bit more in this than the simple ExecuteSQL statement above. First, we’ve changed the column and row delimiters to be XML like to make it easier  to read the data back in case the data contains commas, returns or other text that might break parsing. The following example would return:

<Record><Field>407-555-1212</Field></Record>

That a bit excessive for this simple example, but if we returned back more data, it would be helpful:

<Record><Field>Hal</Field><Field>Gumbert</Field><Field>CampSoftware</Field><Field>407-555-1212</Field></Record>

To extract the data from the XML like data, we can use another calculation. The following will return the first field from the first record. To get any other field from a record, you just have to change the RecordIndex and the FieldIndex.

Let ( [

RecordIndex = 1 ;
FieldIndex = 1 ;

Record = ParseData ( $XML ; "<Record>" ; "</Record>" ; RecordIndex ) ; 
Field = ParseData ( Record ; "<Field>" ; "</Field>" ; FieldIndex )

] ;

Field

)

The calculations above use three Custom Functions, FieldNameQuoted, FieldTableNameQuoted, and ParseData, but they could be replaced by calculations. The idea is to get either the Field or Table name from a FileMaker reference name and also quote the name. We use keys that start with underscores which require quoting. Below are the custom functions:

// FieldNameQuoted ( theField )
//
// Returns the only the Field Name, dropping the text before and including the '::'. Contact::FirstName would return 'FirstName'

Let ( [

theFullName = GetFieldName ( theField ) ; 
theColons = Position ( theFullName ; "::" ; 1 ; 1 ) ;

theFieldName = Middle ( theFullName ; theColons + 2 ; 99999 ) ;
theTableName = Left ( theFullName ; theColons - 1 )

] ;

Char ( 34 ) & theFieldName & Char ( 34 )

)

// FieldTableName ( theField )

//
// Returns the only the Table Name, dropping the text after and including the '::'. Contact::FirstName would return 'Contact'

Let ( [

theFullName = GetFieldName ( theField ) ; 
theColons = Position ( theFullName ; "::" ; 1 ; 1 ) ;

theFieldName = Middle ( theFullName ; theColons + 2 ; 99999 ) ;
theTableName = Left ( theFullName ; theColons - 1 )

] ;

Char ( 34 ) & theTableName & Char ( 34 )

)

// ParseData ( theText; theStartTag; theEndTag; theOccurance)
//
// Extract the text between two strings.
//
// Parameters:
// theText = the text to parse
// theStartTag = the string that comes before the text to extract
// theEndTag = the string that comes after the text to extract
// theOccurance = the instance of the text to extract
//
// Return Value:
// the instance of text found in theText beween theStartTag and theEndTag based on theOccurance
//

Let ( [

theStartPos = Position ( theText ; theStartTag ; 1 ; theOccurance ) ;
theResult = Case (

// ------------------------------
// If theStartTag was not found, return an empty string.
theStartPos = 0 ; "" ;
// ------------------------------

// ------------------------------
// If theStartTag was found, get the string we are looking for.
theStartPos > 0 ; 
Let ( [
theStartPos = theStartPos + Length ( theStartTag ) ;
theEndPos = Position ( theText ; theEndTag ; theStartPos ; 1 ) ;
theLengthToKeep = theEndPos - theStartPos;
theResult = Middle ( theText ; theStartPos ; theLengthToKeep ) 
] ; 
theResult
)
// ------------------------------

) // End case

] ;

theResult

)

To make this happen, I created the following Smart Mailbox for messages in my Inbox from VIPs.

That allowed me to make an inverse Smart Mailbox of messages in my Inbox NOT from VIPs.

With those in place, I now have two Inbox folders that I can use rather than the standard folder. When I’m working, I can focus on VIPs and when I have time, process the non VIP messages…

We then started to create the Word file by hand noticing that just about everything could be done using keyboard shortcuts, typing, and choosing menus. After a bit of Googling, we found AppleScript steps to type, perform keystrokes, and choose menu items.

View on YouTube.

Download the demo file.

Let us know if you like this… Also, if you need any help doing something similar, we can help out with the automation.

Everything worked great when we manually tested it in Safari, so when we tried it in using the FileMaker Web Viewer we were surprised that the page would not load as it did in Safari. We also considered the script step ‘Insert from URL’, but that wouldn’t work since navigation of the site is required.

So we thought if it worked in Safari by hand, why not just go in that direction. So we did a few Google searches and found the AppleScript commands that we needed to make it work and came up with the following AppleScript that left :

Perform AppleScript as Calculated:“¶

property theURL : \"\"¶
¶
tell application \"Safari\"¶
¶
activate¶
¶
set theURL to URL of current tab of window 1¶
set theURL to theURL & \"&title=" & $title & "\"¶
set URL of document 1 to theURL¶
¶
delay 5¶
¶
tell application \"System Events\"¶
keystroke \"u\" using {command down, option down}¶
delay 1¶
keystroke \"a\" using command down¶
delay 1¶
keystroke \"c\" using command down¶
delay 1¶
keystroke \"w\" using command down¶
delay 1¶
keystroke \"[\" using command down¶
delay 1¶
end tell¶
¶
end tell¶
"

This code does the following:

• Define a property variable call theURL.
• Tell Safari to come to the front.
• For our needs, we grab the current Window Tab URL.
• We append a parameter “&title=123″ to go to the URL.
• We pause 5 seconds to give the page time to load.
• Then we use the keyboard to navigate Safari with one second pauses between each step.
• Show the Source Code of the Page.
• Select all of the Source Code Text.
• Copy the Text.
• Close the Source Code Window.
• Then finally go back to the previous page.

Then in our FileMaker script, we simply Paste the Source Code Text into our field.

Let us know what you think and if you have any ideas for this…