Soliant Consulting : Clients - Success Story

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Build custom Find screens for related searches and stored requests.

Often users can be stymied by searching for data that exists in related portals. This is especially true when portals become filtered or dynamic in some way. The development team built complete Find screens that offer users all the search capabilities they need. When the end-user chooses to Find, Replace or Extend their found set, the system will create an appropriate Find request by script and return the appropriate results. Users and administrators can also store Find requests, saving the trouble of having to recreate find routines.

The Find routines use parameter passing and advanced programming techniques to make the addition of new find fields quick and easy. Adding a field to the Find screen consists of: first creating the new field to store the criteria in the 'Finds' table, then adding it to the correct Find layout. From there add references to the field in the main Find script and the subscript that executes the request and finally adding the field to the backup and restore functions. While this may seem like a laborious process, it's quite fast and delivers on what has become a popular function in the applications.

Once these steps are performed, the Find function is updated for both the report manager and the list/detail for that table.

Support user-level preferences and system settings.

A user profile is automatically created for each user of a FileMaker application when the Admin creates and account for them. A wide range of preferences are stored, including user specified preferences, like replacement text for custom email template tags, action shortcuts, margin settings for printed letter, as well as 'transparent preferences' like popup window positions, last selected stored find, and settings for bulk mail operations.

The user profile system in FileMaker Applications uses a system of loading and saving data between records and global values. This method has several advantages. First, the record level data (stored in the table called User_Profiles) can be backup and restored. Secondly, after the preferences are loaded into global values, they can be referenced and updated without any relationships (with FileMaker 7, relationships are not required to work with global data, the table occurrence can be referenced directly), this cuts down on the overhead of the relationship graph. In addition, the loading and saving routines are neatly wrapped up into two scripts that can be reused for cloning profiles and dealing with certain localization issues.

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