Review: Filemaker Pro 9

• Article 54 of 89
• MacFormat, August 2007

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Filemaker Pro’s big selling point is that it’s an easy way to create powerful relational databases and attractive front-ends for working with these databases. With a little bit of work, you can create flexible systems for running whole businesses, managing invoicing, human resources and more that just about anyone can use, and all a lot more quickly than you could rustle up the scripted web pages you’d need to work with MySQL, for example.

Once upon a time, Filemaker (or Claris as it was back then) used to do big releases of Filemaker Pro. These came infrequently and each time there was an extraordinary number of new features. Version seven of Filemaker Pro was probably the last release that could be called big: version eight was a series of small, but important, usability improvements, while 8.5 was little more than a paid-for Universal Binary upgrade with a couple of extra features thrown in to justify the price. Unfortunately, for most users, version 9 is another of these iterative releases.

Filemaker has two big communities to please with each release: the professional database developer who needs powerful features for developing databases and integrating them with enterprise systems; and the talented amateur who just wants to create something that’s easy to use with the minimum of fuss.

Everday use
Version nine has two new main features for the everyday user: conditional formatting and self-adjusting layouts. Conditional formatting lets you change the way an item on a database layout looks, depending on certain conditions. You can change font, colour, size and various other attributes, handy for making a field go red if your client goes into the red, for example. It’s very easy to create these formatting conditions using the provided iTunes-esque pull-down menus – so good, Filemaker would do well to transfer the approach to things like the calculation field definitions section.

Self-adjusting layouts are another good idea. Traditionally, whenever you put a field down on a Filemaker layout, you had to make it as big as it would ever need to be. If you underestimated, your data would be squished into whatever size you’d allocated. Now whenever you drop a field onto your layout, the Info palette gives you the option of making the field auto-adjusting in any direction, so that if there’s more space available with the current window size, the field will expand to fill it to your specifications.

This comes in particularly handy with the web viewer layout objects that Filemaker introduced into version 8.5. These require you to define an area on your layout that will let you view a web page. The obvious flaw is that most web pages are designed to fit… a page, not a small box. While Filemaker Pro would occasionally see fit to provide scrollbars for the web viewer, fluid layouts such as Google Maps’ would get crushed into the box with no way to scroll around.

That’s still true in version nine and although there have been updates to allow the web viewer to deal with https web pages properly and provide a progress bar and status messages, there’s still no way to ensure there will always be scrollbars; you also have to create your own backwards, forwards and refresh buttons, unless you can trust your users to right-click for options on your viewer. By making your web viewer automatically adjustable, you can at least give it as much space as you have available, so your user might stand a chance of being able to see some of the designated web page. However, you’ll need to design your layout carefully to ensure that fields don’t start overlapping accidentally when you resize the screen.

Other features slowly crawl down the ladder of general-purpose usefulness. Multiple undos for text editing should be a lifesaver for certain users, providing they don’t click outside the text field. The PDF script step now allows you to append pages to an existing PDF, which should come in useful if you want to create a PDF from multiple found-sets of records or multiple layouts. You can specify the default tab on a tabbed layout object as well as its width. A new Quick Start screen is essentially just a prettier version of 8.5’s equivalent screen and the toolbar has a couple of extra buttons for data export. You can also specify which fields the spellchecker will work with and arrange your scripts menu into folders. There are new Avery labels. You can email a link to a hosted version of Filemaker. And calm your heart as you hear that there’s now a “Learn” button on critical dialogs that will take you to Filemaker’s Help system if you click it. There’s more web help, too, and a software update function.

Other changes are geared towards the high-end developer. There’s a really rather good external SQL sources manager that makes it almost as easy to access other databases from within Filemaker as it is to access Filemaker databases. There are a few more calculation functions, including status functions for the current temporary folder and the host version. A ‘self’ function that uses the current object’s value will take some thinking to find a use for, but will come in handy for multi-object functions – maybe.

Hard-core
For hard-core developers, the more expensive Advanced version of Filemaker Pro now includes an improved Script Debugger that can be run in several windows and that has new functions for stopping, starting and debugging scripts. The Data Viewer has been similarly enhanced to provide a view of all the variables used by the current script, not just the ones you’ve asked to watch. These do make debugging easier than before, but won’t do it for you.

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