Low Hanging Fruit

Lounge (Discussions)
1

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 ..

and many more ..

5 Likes
2

At Claris Engage they talked about a Quality of Live team being formed to improve the quality and do things like this.

Showing the theme as column is a great idea to quickly find old themes!

And that is a feature request I got previously, but can't do via plugin.

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maybe we start our own list here and Claris is welcome to indulge ..
(have many more ideas like that ..)

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also sometimes you haven't saved some styles or themes and it helps a lot to stay consistent ... many use cases.

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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.

6

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.

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Great to have you onboard @FabriceN. It is more likely to be at least a decade ago though ..

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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!

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9

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.

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10

New Window Script step with option to open in specified window mode. For example “in find mode’.
(Maybe not a very low hanging one)

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11

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 …

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12

Sorry, I didn't get the Script debugger thing. Can you re-explain slowly? :wink:

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Please read carefully:

  1. Run the debugger step by step
  2. continue to step through until you want to know involved fields' and variables' content
  3. search for each involved values in the Data Viewer. Relevant fields should be flagged with a dot left to the listing.
  4. Step into the next Script Step and try to wander your eyes into the data viewer searching for involved variables or fields again ..
  5. Do this until you get dizzy ..
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Ah! Got it. Great idea!
I guess 20 years of script debugger made me too dizzy to understand on the first read.

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15

Well, if you are on macOS and use MBS Plugins

  • We have tooltips for debugger to show values of variables and fields.
  • Add a search feature to the data viewer
  • And we can hide fields or global variables in the data viewer.

I know a few developers, who would love to see this built-in to FileMaker, so they could get it for Windows, too.

2 Likes
16

Right click in a data Field > Omit matching records to quickly hone a found set.

Compare this tiny solution to what you have to do currently …

  1. Look at the data and remember it or select and copy it
  2. Enter find mode
  3. Type or paste the data into the field
  4. If the toolbar is not visible make it visible
  5. Press the Omit option
  6. On the records/requests menu choose constrain records
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17

Great feature. Still the tooltip tickling moving hovering slightly distracting IMHO

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  1. Styles Inspector
    1. Filter by Search on name
    2. Visualisation tools for styles, simultaneous display of all states of a style.
    3. Inspector. Such as we see in web browser when we inspect an object.
    4. 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.
  2. Filter by Search in Manage Layouts to include Layout Table Name in the search. Optionally include the layout number and layout ID columns.
  3. In the Fields Inspector, in layout mode, display the table picker and the search filter at the same time!
  4. Allow Users to define default options for script steps, such as
    1. Go to Record/Request/Page [ With dialog: OFF ]
  5. Data Viewer:
    1. Save many collections of watch variables
    2. Have tabbed watch variables, to move between open sets
    3. Close/Open new tabs
    4. Move "evaluate" checkbox into the tab set
  6. Script Workspace:
    1. Searchable, e.g., search within scripts
    2. 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.
  7. 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.
    1. Searchable by table occurrence name.
    2. Searchable by table name
    3. Searchable by external data source
  8. Manage Database:
    1. Tables - search filter by name, type, comment
    2. Tables - show/hide ID, show/hide creation date/modification date/account created/account modified
    3. Fields - search filter by name, type, comment, field attributes ( global storage, index status)
    4. Fields - show/hide ID/creation date/modification date/account created/account modified
7 Likes
19

Custom Fonts for Webdirect.

There are a lot of font families that are easier to read on screen than the few safe web fonts:
IBM Plex
Fira Sans
…

These I would like to be able to use for my apps. And some may want to use special fonts with regards to their corporate design.

4 Likes
20

Preserve column width adjustments in all of the "Manage ...." windows.

8 Likes