Would be great if Claris HQ would be open to enhancing our favorite top notch tool called FM with little improvements assumably requiring less dev resources but huge impact for us developers.
Here is one example: In the Manage Layouts window it shows three columns Layout Name, Associated Table, Menu Set. What's missing and should be easy to add would be Theme and the status of the layouts' themes and styles ..
Do you know how they select people to be on that team? Is it all internal staff? I'd like to see about getting on that.
As a non-programmer and a bit of a noob I feel like there's a perspective that is important for Filemaker to be more accessible to new users that would get lost if they focus 100% on people who are advanced enough to be at Claris Engage.
About a year ago, I initiated a conversation with Claris about those very small things that could be fixed/imrpoved. This Theme column was among them.
If you have ideas, now is a good time to talk to me.
We're not talking about great features that would change the world here. Just very small changes that would make our lives easier.
Some examples: change the default export encoding to UTF-8, check Yes for Exit after last by default… those things.
Another one would be flag (with a badge) in the Relationship graph all relationshops with cascading deletes.
Would extend even further and place on the layouts overview how deletion in the context of that layout would lead to implications etc ..
(if you would 'program' this in FileMaker it would be minor dev!
here is another one: a check box in the data viewer to display JSON pretty-printed (same which JSONFormatElements does. Would save a lot of time with one click to toggle between a JSON result showing well formatted without the need to do this your self.
Script debugger with display of involved values to minimize data viewer hassle. Since the debugger came out 2 decades ago whenever yo7 stepped through you needed to scan the data viewer for touched fields and variables. Instead of the dots display just move these over on the current debugger’ focus line …
Visualisation tools for styles, simultaneous display of all states of a style.
Inspector. Such as we see in web browser when we inspect an object.
Optimisation tools for improving CSS, such as being able to identify styles that override the default font, and to remove an overriding attribute from all states.
Filter by Search in Manage Layouts to include Layout Table Name in the search. Optionally include the layout number and layout ID columns.
In the Fields Inspector, in layout mode, display the table picker and the search filter at the same time!
Allow Users to define default options for script steps, such as
Go to Record/Request/Page [ With dialog: OFF ]
Data Viewer:
Save many collections of watch variables
Have tabbed watch variables, to move between open sets
Close/Open new tabs
Move "evaluate" checkbox into the tab set
Script Workspace:
Searchable, e.g., search within scripts
Dependency Search, Show where a script is used. Optionally, include external data references. Show a descriptor beside the object name to indicate layout object, object trigger, script step, etc.
Relationship Graph. Searchable in a sensible search box that produces a list of names. The list allows us to select the object that we want and it then reveals a list of related table occurrences. The list allows us to explore and edit a relationship definition. The current hopscotch across the relationship graph based on the first one or two letters is ridiculous.