Snapshot Link, on the other hand, is quick and easy. Here again, this functionality has been within the reach of experienced developers for a long time, but saving and retrieving found sets involved marking records or capturing record IDs and saving them in the database itself, and in either case required a little intermediate-level scripting. You could create a Snapshot Link to save your mother’s preferred list, and another Snapshot Link to save your own preferred list. Say you’re planning a wedding and trying to sort out the guest list. Snapshot Link is also a neat way to save your own found set. For these reasons, Snapshot Link seems most useful when you’re dealing with relatively stable data and you want to save customized record sets that would be hard to recover otherwise. If something has changed in a record, the record will be displayed with the new data. A Snapshot Link won’t reflect records that have been added or deleted after the Snapshot Link has been created. It simply saves the record IDs of the records in your found set. The Snapshot Link file isn’t a true snapshot, as if you made a screen capture nor does it save the find criteria you might have used to get the records you are looking at. You can send this little file to another user (who must have FileMaker Pro 11 and access to the database) who can open it and instantly see exactly what you were looking at. The new Snapshot Link saves the precise found set, layout and sort order of your current view in a FileMaker Pro Snapshot Link (.fpsl) file. Two nifty features in FileMaker Pro 11 relate to the exchange or sharing of data. You tell FileMaker Pro what you want to summarize and how (count by state, average by total sales, etc.) and FileMaker does the rest for you: creates the summary field and the subsummary layout part, and displays the results immediately. However, there is one potential gotcha-if you create a subsummary total this way, you won’t be able to format the result, so you might see “7.333334” when you would prefer to see “7.3.” For experienced developers, these changes are not a big deal, but for ordinary do-it-yourself users, they represent a real step forward. In FileMaker Pro 11, you can do all of this on the fly (so to speak) without leaving browse mode. To set up a dynamic subsummary in FileMaker Pro 10, you had to define the summary calculation (say, count of records by state) in the Manage Database Dialog, then you had to switch into Layout Mode and use a couple of dialogs to set up the subsummary display. With dynamic subsummaries you can total sorted groups of records while you continue to edit data. Note also that the user has previous defined a Quick Report that groups and counts records by City.įileMaker Pro 11 expands upon dynamic subsummaries, which were introduced in FileMaker Pro 10. In this shot, the user has created some fields, added some data, then created a new field (“#”), moved it into place as the first column, and the user is now changing the type of this field from text to number. The greatly improved table view in FileMaker Pro 11 is the default view when you create a new database, allowing you to create new fields by simply clicking a + button (shown here to the right of the Zip field). Experienced developers will probably continue to do things the old-fashioned way, using the Manage Database dialog.Īnother neat enhancement to Table View: You can now quickly show or hide fields without having to edit the underlying layout, which wasn’t possible before. fairly simple lists) will surely be grateful for the running start that the new interface provides. On the other hand, careful do-it-yourselfers building flat-file databases (i.e. I will bet a plate of barbecued pork ribs that somebody is going to make a mess of a new database using this new user interface, since it really doesn’t require much thought. You can’t create a new table or define a relationship working this way. As a data-modeling fanatic and notorious killjoy, I worry that FileMaker Pro 11 may have made things easier here than they should be.
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