Miscellaneous tips

Three simple tips: what to use for a temporary mark, how to test different privilege sets, how to develop for two platforms at once.

Yellow tape

When you're busy writing an application you often need to mark some parts of the code as ‘not ready yet’ or ‘needs adjustment’, or… Well, the mark doesn't need an exact meaning, it must just catch the eye as you look at the code.

Under Mac OS X I found it quite good to add a bold dot (Option + 8) to the name. Such names become much easier to spot in a list or in a calculation.

Every time I edit the code I see these marks and they constantly remind me I wanted to do something in this place.

I use this mark mainly for fields, tables (TOs), and scripts. I often start with a series of empty scripts marked with dots just to see how many scripts I'm going to have, how they will probably interact and whether I can add some common subroutines. Then I finish them one by one. When I'm ready, I remove the mark, which makes me feel I'm doing good.

If I'm going to get rid of some field, script or table occurrence, I use the same dot, but place it in the beginning of the name.

In this case when I see the mark I tell myself: “Rewrite the code to use that other way”.

Testing privilege sets

If you write a complex application with lots of different privilege sets, it's important to test every privilege set as you go. And, if something is wrong, quickly fix it and test again until there's no bugs anymore. To do this you'll need the test accounts, of course

but to make the process really smooth, you also need to switch between them really fast. So I use an utility layout with as many buttons as I have different privilege sets.

Every buttons executes the Re-login script step with one of test accounts and one extra button logs me back with full access.

The re-login script step simply logs you in as another user without changing anything, e.g. current layout or record. With such a palette you write code, login as another user, test, re-login with full access, fix the error and test again in a matter of minutes.

Cross-platform development

FileMaker® is cross-platform and though in most part it behaves same on both, there's still a number of platform-dependent differences: fonts don't fit, same layout needs separate window sizes to fit, dialogs are unlike, behavior of certain script steps is dissimilar. So if you write an application that is to be deployed on both Macs and PCs it's important to keep an eye on how it works to catch possible problems before they matured.

I found it quite effective to use two computers to do this. Deploy the FileMaker Server (a development license for 3 users will be enough), host the files on the server and open the same file from both Mac and PC.

I do most of the development on Mac and use PC to fine-tune screen forms.

---

I decided to write new posts on Sundays, but the next Sunday is the last day of the year, so I'm not sure if I can make it. Anyway, next post (on about Dec 31, 2006, - Jan 1, 2007): how to send HTML email.

Comments

[David Graham]

RE: Cross-platform development

Our DB Design Team have both Mac and Windows boxes with the screens side-by-side. Then we tie them together with Synergy, which is like a software KVM but without the V. In other words, you use one keyboard and mouse to control both computers. When you mouse off the edge of one screen it begins controlling the other computer and vice versa. It even includes text-only copy/paste functionality.

After you get used to Synergy you'll wonder how you ever got by without it. It's free, open-source and available for Mac, Win (and Linux if you care).

Download:
http://umn.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/synergy2/synergy-1.3.1-1.OSX.tar.gz

Mac users might want "SynergyKM: The Missing GUI" (Pref Pane/Installer):
http://software.landryhetu.com/synergy/

[Mikhail Edoshin]

This is very interesting. Thank you for the information.