 Hello and welcome, everyone. My name is Ryan Manook. I'm a solutions consultant here at FileMaker, and I'm really excited to be your host for today's Create Your Custom App webinar, where you're gonna learn the essential steps in creating your first custom app with material taken from the Create Custom App success guide. But before we get started, I have some brief housekeeping notes. So for the best experience, we strongly recommend that you participate in this webinar with at least a broadband connection. So if you have any problems or require online assistance at any time, please contact Citrix Technical Support at 888-259-8414. Again, that number is 888-259-8414. Now during today's presentation, you'll have the opportunity to type in and ask questions. So let's talk briefly about how to do that. Just go to the control panel, click on the question section, enter your question and click on send. So we'll try to cover as many questions as time allows at the end of our presentation. But remember, you don't need to wait until then to submit a question. And now I'd like to introduce you to David. He's the president of Angel City Data, a Platinum FileMaker Business Alliance Partner based out of Los Angeles, California. Thanks, Ryan. It's good to be here today. I'm very excited to help shine a light on how to create custom apps with FileMaker Pro. As Ryan said, we're in the greater Los Angeles area, Burbank to be precise. Our sort of our company mantra is beautiful business software. We like to build stuff that looks good and works good for our customers. We've been an FBA Platinum member and reseller for quite a while. And we're also a three-time Excellence Award winner. So we know our way around the FileMaker world pretty well. One of our assumptions for this session today is that you understand that there's this really great series that FileMaker has created for the new app developer that is guidelines on how to get started building your own custom app. And it's sort of a three-pronged approach, how to plan and then how to create and then how to deploy. And I want to kind of just drop you in really quickly. The plan PDF, there's a copy of it here and it's available on the FileMaker website. It's got some really great tips on how to organize your data, how to evaluate your goals, how to execute and how to identify the different users. Like we like to say, measure twice, cut once. So from that standpoint, a good plan, a good set of documents that are gonna act as your blueprint are such a great time saver and there's such a great way to help get organized. And so from that standpoint, the second guide, which is sort of a dovetail fit to that is the Create Guide. And it's a PDF as well available. We're going to basically kind of do a light breeze through of this document. We're gonna kind of show some examples and give you some insights in this. But it's a great resource, again, for how to build things and to get into some of the specifics of how FileMaker works and how you need to identify specific areas of your database and the types of tools that you're gonna wanna use in those areas. So I wanna make sure that you're aware these two great resources exist followed by the Deploy one, which we'll mention later. But this is, it's such a really great series to kind of help get you oriented and get you on the right path so that your app has a great chance of succeeding within your work group. So let's get started. Let's talk about how we move forward. Let's just assume we've got a plan and we wanna get started the actual creation of that app. Couple of different ways of doing it from FileMaker Pro. One of the first that I always sort of enjoy is basically pulling data in from a spreadsheet. I may have a list or started grouping some data into a spreadsheet and I go, wow, this is sort of what I want, now I wanna get that into FileMaker. I'm gonna show you that in a second. You can also just open FileMaker and start creating a brand new database from scratch, if you like. If you're more comfortable identifying what your tables are and your list of fields, you can absolutely go that route. And then the starter solution, one of my favorites. There's all these great templates that are built in from FileMaker that you can use and they get you quickly up to speed because some of them have some really great sort of scaffolding in them that you can use instead of having to spend all this time on a lot of minutia. So let's take a quick look at a couple of these options here. I can grab a spreadsheet, I've got this spreadsheet here, and it's got a rental car tracking. You can rent exotic cars from this company and I just pulled it down. I thought it'd be fun to look at. Maybe I wanna rent a Lamborghini Aventador for $3,500 a week. Well, maybe not, but I wanna use this as a model and just show you the ease at which I can grab a spreadsheet, drag it onto the FileMaker icon, and it's just asking me, hey, do you wanna use that first row of data for field names? I'll go, yeah, sure. And it's gonna basically punch this thing out into a FileMaker database, so boom. As easily as that, my data is now in a much more powerful engine than a spreadsheet in that I've got multiple columns and fields I can do sorting natively. I can share this instantly on a server. I can get this onto iPhone's iPads. I can have it set to be backed up in a served environment. So there's so many advantages of getting your data out of those flat single user spreadsheets into a multi-user platform like FileMaker where you can get it on a server, host it, and then start sharing your data with others. Now, of course, this is a real simple view of the data, but that's not quite as sexy or as usable as one might hope sometimes. I like using the starter solutions in FileMaker. I think they're a great entry point, especially for a new developer. So I can just go up to that menu for Get Started. And by the way, guess what? We're using the brand new version of FileMaker, FileMaker Pro 15, just shipped yesterday. So the community of developers that use FileMaker are very excited about it. So from this Get Started screen, I've got a number of things that I can do, but I want to just kind of peruse the starter solutions and maybe pick one that I feel is gonna suit my needs. So this is a great way to kind of get started. So literally clicking that one button, and now I have this template in the background called Content Management. And again, it's ready for me right now to start dragging and dropping information into. So sort of for a business model, I'm a former record producer, and I worked on a lot of projects. And maybe when I get to be 65, I'm gonna open a used record store. And I need a system to keep track of my used records. Well, over here, I've got maybe a collection of album artwork, et cetera, on various things. So maybe I wanna just drag some artwork in here. And I could come in here and call this Full Moon Fever is the name of the album. There's Tom Petty. So as you can see, this solution is already storing my data. I can use some of the fields that are in here. I can enter data and so forth. And that's a great way to get started getting your data into FileMaker so that you can kind of begin to start using it. So just because I've got data in a database doesn't mean I'm finished. You want to take time in your database to organize your data into logical groupings. You don't wanna put real estate properties into the same area that you might keep a list of contacts or product inventory. So that's why you wanna be very organized in how you logically group those entities or things that belong together. And so that's a really key part of getting that planning stage right. As you start identifying workflows and so forth, you're gonna wanna start grouping things together like contacts all belong together and maybe time entries belong together and maybe inventory or product listings belong together. Once you have those entities sort of broken out, if you will, then the next job is to go, well, see, sure, I have contacts. What are some of the fields that I might want in a contact table? Like first name, last name, city, state, zip, et cetera. You can see from this example, an entity might be a list of cars, like we saw in our little spread channel, some of the attributes, the things that describe a car might include manufacturer, model, year, color, horsepower, price, things of that nature. So you want to group your data into these logical buckets so that you have the most amount of flexibility when you're doing reporting and other things about that. So I'm gonna show you how we're gonna add some entities or fields to the system that we have here. I'm gonna just grab a copy of what we just created and it's got all of my, let's just say it's got all of my album artwork in here. Oopsie, getting a little, there we go. So it's got some album artwork in here and a collection of those. But you know, I want to enhance my attributes for my list of fields here. I want to kind of change things around based on what I have here. So I'm gonna go into the layout mode and I'm going to, I'm just gonna get rid of this description field. I don't feel that I need that. But I'm gonna go in and create some additional fields. So I'm in my contact management database table. I can see the list of fields that I have. You know, I don't want to use the name name for a field. I want to change that to the word title. That seems like it fits better with my album collection. And you know, I actually might want to have something like an artist field so that I can identify that. So I'm gonna type in artist, tell File Maker to give me another text field there. And maybe I'm gonna put in a genre field. So I want to keep track of the kind of music that's on that album and let's just add one more field like a year field. I want to know the release year. And because that might be something I want to sort in ascending order numerically, I'm gonna make that a number field. So I can do these quick changes to my system. Those fields are now inside the database. And you can see that name got changed to title. But what I'm gonna do right now is add those fields I just created. They're available in my field picker here. This is not difficult. I can just go in here and say, hey, let's grab my artist field. Let's put it up above there. And of course I can spend some time and make this look nice and format it and so forth. I'll do that a little bit later. But I'm gonna grab my genre field and maybe put it down there. And then I'll grab, you know, maybe I'll put here down below here or something. So now if I go back into browse mode, I now have the availability of being able to put in whatever I'd like in those fields. I've created new storage attributes. So I can just type in some nice information there. And maybe I'm gonna say this is, let's just say 2001, I'm guessing here. And I could type in rock as the genre if I want to. So I'm giving myself really great attributes and fields that are gonna help make my data richer and more meaningful to me. And again, it's not that difficult to do. So, you know, one of the things that's sort of interesting that I have in here is I have these things that are pull down lists or maybe a calendar picker, things that help my data entry go a little more seamless and a little quicker. So let's try to see if we can do that for our genre field. So once again, I'm in layout mode. I'm gonna grab that genre field and over here in FileMaker, I have this thing called an inspector. And it tells me the properties of whatever I've highlighted. So I'm gonna go over to this inspector and over here I have a control style area where I can say let's create a dropdown list for this system. And I wanna create a brand new dropdown list and I'm gonna call that dropdown list genre. And of course I can go in here and type rock or jazz or comedy or whatever. I'm not gonna do that. I'm gonna just go over here. I've got a list, I had a list. There we go, genres. Let's grab that. I'm gonna just copy that list of genres and I'm gonna paste those in there. And so what I've just done is added a value list to this field so that when I click into it, I can quickly and easily account this. Oh, this is a swing band and so I can put those sort of elements and again, ensure that my data's being entered quickly and consistently with using a value list for that data entry. So that's a great way to kind of get that data into your system. One of the other things that you have the capability of in FileMaker, I think we've all heard the term relational database. It sounds sort of powerful and mysterious but it is absolutely powerful. It is a mechanism by which you link things together that belong to each other. So for instance, I might want to have in my database an artist table where I wanna keep track of Tom Petty and I wanna link that artist to every record that he's ever done. Damn the torpedoes or Full Moon Fever or what have you. So I can link that one artist to those multiple related albums and not have to do data entry in each album. I can just link it and then have that sort of mechanically belong to each other. So we use relationships in databases for things like linking line items to an invoice, linking multiple phone numbers to a single contact, linking multiple appointments to a single day or person. So one of the things that you want to be careful of is this is one of the more carefully planned areas of your database. If you find yourself in a database creating fields like description one, description two, description three or appointment one, appointment two or appointment three, you catch yourself doing that. That's probably time for you to look at possibly going into a relational model that might be a little more beneficial. And let me give you an example of how our relationship is already baked in to this content management system that we've used. We have this notes area down below. Now I could just have a simple notes field but I can come in here and say this rocks and I've got a note in here that's been entered that has my initials, the date and the time and I've got the ability to come in here and say I want to put in some more notes. This was produced by T-Bone Burnett. So I can put in unlimited notes. Each one of them has its own date and time and this I can go on forever. So I can have unlimited notes here and I don't have to have multiple fields to do that. So the way that is done, and we're not going to get into this in too much depth but in the managed database area you have the ability to see the tables of data, the fields within those tables and the relationships between the tables. So already built into this demo is the ability for one piece of content. You can see this little crow's foot here which is many, many notes can be associated with it. So I think it's a really great mechanism that allows you to kind of build that sort of productivity and extensibility, that scalability of having unlimited actions or unlimited notes or unlimited line items on an invoice. So that's the power of relationships. You're going to want to take a look at that. There's some great training materials on the FileMaker website and I think that it's an area that bars special attention. I think that designing layouts and building some automation and scripts and adding fields is a relatively, I think those are relatively simple in that respect but getting your head around what belongs in a table and how those tables link to each other. That takes a little bit of time to grok. Once you get it, your databases are going to be smaller, more powerful, better reporting, less typing, less errors from typing the same thing over and over. So it's really a great capability of adding power to your system. So invest a little bit of brain power in getting your head around relationships because it's going to pay off well for you. So the other parts, you've seen us create calculation or pardon me, straight fields, regular attributes and fields that describe our albums. We put in a year field and a genre field and so forth. But one of the other things that we can do is we can create calculation fields. These are fields that return data. Generally text and numbers are the most common but it can also return dates or times or even pictures, images, anything that can be stored in a container field. So calculations are very similar to formulas in spreadsheets and they allow you to do some kind of cool things. So I'm going to see if I've got the right copy of this open. I do. So let's just say I've got, I put something in here and I say this is rock genre. I want to go in and create a little helper field that's going to use a calculation. So I'm going to go into here and I'm going to create a field called class. What I'm going to do is I'm going to make that a calculation field over here. And I hit create and FileMaker knows, oh, you're asking for a calculation field so I'm going to give you this formula dialogue, this calculation area where I can pick to use fields. I can pick various types of calc formatting or evaluation tools and use them in my formula. So I'm just going to try to do, I'm going to see if I can do this in real time. I'm going to use a case statement. And I'm going to say case the genre field equals let's just say comedy or genre field, let's just say this. I'm going to see if I do this right. This is going to end up really nicely if I equals let's just say poetry. Then what I want to have happen after that, I can say if that is the case, then I want to make sure that we're going to call this, let's just say spoken word. If I don't have that condition met then I want to use the term music. So what I've basically done is put in a formula for my class field that says if the genre is comedy or poetry, we're going to call this a spoken word classification, otherwise music. So I've just built that calculation. And if I want to, I can let's just say I want to drag that field out here. And if I change this to country, it is a music class. If I change it to comedy, ah, it automatically toggles over to spoken word. So again, instead of me having to go in and search for country and rock and jazz, I can literally maybe just go into my search window here and say, hey, I want to find all of my music. Did I do that right? Class. Let's just say I want to find all my spoken words. It's not working right for some reason. Well, if I do this right, if I do this right, what it does is it turns into this and I can do comedy, country, et cetera. And then I can search by any of those types of criteria. So you can see how a formula and the use of these calculations can help you derive content really quickly from other data that you may already have in your system. Next up, how do I want to present my data? So I've got all these great fields. I've got my tables of albums. I've got my fields, genre, and so forth. There's many different ways I might want to present that data. So there's a number of mechanisms for being able to create, maybe I want to create an iPad screen for doing an inventory check. Or maybe I want to build a web form using FileMaker WebDirect so that visitors to my website can see what I have in inventory. So these are all different sort of use cases where I might want to build a different layout. And again, picking a theme that's going to look the way I want, choosing the output or the device that I want, and then arranging which fields and tailoring that screen for that use. So for my example, I think I want to use a, I'm going to just start with this field with all of my fields in order here. And let's just say I want to run, I want to create a report that shows me my inventory, grouped a certain way, maybe by genre. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go into layout mode, which allows me to design any of my screens. I can modify what I've got here, but look at this lovely little wizard that we've got. We've got this new report wizard. And again, I can say I want to show records from my content management table. We'll call this report. And I can pick which type of device. I can see if I want it to be one of these or an iPhone or something. But for this particular use, I'm going to say this is going to be a print output and I want it in a report format. So now there's other options that come my way. I can go, great, do I want to show subtotals or grand totals or what have you? I'll do that later. I'll show you sort of a final version. But for right now, all I want to do is bring over maybe my image, the artist, the title of the album and maybe the year. So I've just added those. Now it's saying, hey, do you want to group them by certain things? I can say not for the moment. For right now, I want this to be a simple thing and maybe we'll, you know what, I'm going to go back. I'm going to go back and I'm going to say, yeah, we're going to bring over genre. And instead of just having this a simple thing, we're going to group this by genre. So we're going to make this broken out by the various types of genres and that makes this report more powerful. So how do I want to sort records when I come here? Well, by genre and artist, I also have the options of going, hey, I can put a page number or the date and the time or any of that in these areas of the header and footer. We'll pull those off for the moment. And I can also choose to create a script. But we'll do that separately later. But what I want you to see is that already without doing anything, we sort of got a report that shows some of our data in a different format than what we had there. So let's go in here and clean this up a little bit. I've got my, I'm going to show, I have a genre area here. I want to make my, let's just make my body part a little bigger. Maybe I'm going to make this image. We'll make this, drag this out, make it a little bigger. We'll put the title below the artist. We'll put the year below there. I don't know that I need to have my genre field and I'm going to stretch these out just to make sure we have enough room. So me just doing a little bit of dragging made things a little nicer. So I can even go a step further and I can pull these things off. And now I've got this sort of printout of all of my stuff that's much more portable. I could print this out to a PDF or share it with somebody. And again, by using some of the report capabilities of FileMaker, we can even, what we just did is we sorted by the genre field and FileMaker said, oh, we built this report to break out those sections. So now I can see my comedy, my eclectic, my folk, here's all of our jazz, here's all of our rock. So we've got some pretty meaningful data here just by creating a layout and arranging the data that we already have in some pretty interesting ways. So that's sort of a really kind of cool way to be able to just kind of repurpose my layouts for the different types of form factors. So if I'm using print, I can use smaller fonts. If I'm working on an iPad, I might want to have less fields to tangle with. Again, we'll talk about this and design it a little bit. So one of the key areas of power for me as a, when I was a young developer in FileMaker, man, I absolutely got thrilled when I started getting into scripting. And scripting is sort of like a macro type of thing in a spreadsheet program, but it's really automation. It's basically this engine in the background of FileMaker where you can put commands together in a very English-like manner and sit there and go, hey, I want to go to this layout. I want to print this. I want to then email it. I want to sort. I want to go to the next record. So using the scripting engine, instead of having your users have to manually change layout so remember all of the steps regarded to create a specific report, you can build this programming-like interface where you can sit there and put in these commands, attach it to a button, and magic happens. So it's a really great thing. It's very fun. And I'll give you an example of how we might do something like that. I'll go into layout mode on this particular screen and I'm going to just go grab a button up here. My button pop over. I'm going to just grab. I'm going to grab this button, put it over here and I'm just going to call it report for the moment. So I've got this report button. It doesn't do anything. I click on it. It says, hey, it does nothing. Well, thank you for nothing. Let's see if we can add some magic to it. So I want this to perform a script, which is again, that's the FileMaker automation engine. Now I've just said specify a script. Well, these are existing scripts or routines that are inside a FileMaker. I want a new one. So I want to create a new one for that report that we just created a minute ago. So I'm going to call this my genre report. And you can see I've got this little workspace here where I can pick from any number of features, any of these commands over here that work with different areas of the system. And I can pull those in and use those as steps to execute in my script. So it's really kind of cool. You're kind of doing a monkey see monkey do thing here. So I'm going to start with building this out. I'm going to say first thing I want to do, I can just start typing and I can see a list of commands. I want to show all my records in the database. Maybe I want to then sort them. I've got that sort that works off of what I've got in there. So I'm going to start typing sort and I do want to sort the records in my database. I'm going to want to specify by genre, by artist. I can also go, yeah, and I also want to see year in there. So I'm telling FileMaker when I run this button, grab all my records, get all my albums, sort them by this. I do not want to have this dialogue on. So there's options within each of these and you can kind of poke into these things and see what they are. So we'll sort those records. Well, that means I'm going to be on my current screen sorted, but I've got that nice report layout. So let's go to layout, specify which layout. Oh, there's that report layout I created. I want to use that. And because I want it to aggregate and group and look proper on paper, I'm also going to want to make this enter preview mode. And once I've done that, I'm going to probably let the end user, I'm going to pause that. So first I'm going to grab all the records. We're going to sort it. We're going to take them to the proper report layout. We're going to put it in preview so they can see what it looks like. From there they can choose to print it or what have you. And if they don't, I'm going to go into browse mode and then take them back to the original layout. So I've really just chained together six simple, easy to read commands into this little engine, which I just love. It's the FileMaker scripting engine. And of course I've created all this. I've attached it to my button. I can do other things with this button. I can change the formatting, maybe put an icon on it, any of those types of things. But let's see if I got this perfect. Maybe I didn't, but we'll find out. So I'm going to click this button and it just took me to the report layout. It sorted everything. It grouped it. It put it into a preview mode so I can crank this out as a PDF or print it right from where I want. And you'll notice we put that pause in there. So the user has a chance to interact with the data here, print or do whatever. Maybe they just want to look at it. And when they hit continue, it takes them back. So that's kind of cool. We just built a really simple report. Show me my inventory. What do I have by each type or genre? And I can see those in real quick fashion and then come right back to where I was. So that's the power of the scripting engine, which I think is really fun. It's the funnest part of FileMaker. It's also, it's one of the areas that it's a deep pool of capabilities. There are so many things that you can do with scripting in terms of importing or exporting or opening files or sending emails or running a process or changing a color of an object on a screen or other things. There's all sorts of things that you can do with scripts that add power and elegance to your system. So it's something that as you explore them, you're gonna find more and more opportunities to kind of go down that path. So, you know, one of the things that is sort of powerful about data, you know, I always tell business owners, if you're just collecting your data, you're playing defense. If you use that data to drive business results or to improve processes or efficiencies, you're using data for offense. And that's what I like. So once you have collected that data, what can you do with it? Well, we just showed how we can have reports that are generated from our data. We've got some examples here. This is sort of a sample sales report. And you can see that it's, we have things grouped by the year with grand totals by year. Here's the previous year, et cetera. You can also do dashboards by looking at your data using some of the calculations like we just did. And then even using a chart interface, which is also built into FileMaker, you could perhaps do some bar charts, line charts, pie charts, and other mechanisms. But again, imagine what you would have if you logged into your system and could see how many records did I sell today or what are my top genre of albums for this year, et cetera. So I think, or who are my top sellers within our store? I think that might be really good use of your data. And you're now letting your data help drive your performance and your business and the decision making. So I think it's really critical when you go through that planning phase to ask yourself, what are the kinds of things I'm hoping to collect from my data so that I can then again, collect that data and purpose it in a way that's gonna be really visible and help me drive results from the data that I've got. So by the way, and I wanna just jump off, I've got sort of this demo right here. I've got sort of a full version of it that's a little cleaner, a little nicer. I built an icon over here. But just by adding one extra thing, I put a little, I put an extra field down here, a summary field, which is sort of like a calculation. But right now I can see what the total of my inventory is and by each genre. So very quickly, this is again, it's sort of a measurable piece of data. I've got 11 albums. I've got four rock albums, et cetera. So you can see this is in a very junior sort of fashion, a very useful piece of data that I can report on from within my system. So we're kind of in this interesting place. We've just opened a template, added some attributes, some new fields, created a value list to help simplify the data entry, put in a calculation field to help provide some logic based on the data that I already have. We've shown you how you can create a new layout that you maybe wanna use for reporting or maybe we do a different layout for iPhone users or for web users. But again, creating a different view of the data that you're already collecting, very powerful. And then once we've got that data collected and presented, we can use automation to help navigate or sort or present that data in different ways. And obviously reporting is what do you intend to do with that data, whether it's printing out an invoice or looking at quarterly metrics, anything and all between. So we've sort of gone through, in a real breezy fashion, some of the cores of creating an app inside a file maker. Some other things to think about. These are sort of anecdotes to think about. What about design principles? We got questions in our earlier session. Can you build a desktop screen that's gonna work on an iPhone? Yes, technically you could, but that's not paying attention to the device and the environment that it might be used in. So you want your designs to factor in who is the user, what are the tasks that they're doing, and what kind of device are they gonna be using, and even where are they gonna be using it? So for instance, if we're building something that's gonna be used in bright sunlight, we're gonna use very sharp, high contrast items. We might not do that for something that's gonna be in an office. So to give you a sense, I wanna just give you three examples here of different types of screen designs and for the purposes they serve. This is a desktop screen for a relatively good sized company's order tracking system. And I've got full navigation over here to the side. Nice iconography. I've got multiple tab panels that allow me to keep track of multiple things that are deeply entrenched in here. I've got highlighted very, very appropriately, up at the top of the screen, key information about this. I've got logical data groupings. These are all the dates that are important. These are all the order specifics. These are the sales specifics. So, and I've got lots of buttons and they can be relatively small because, guess what? I have a mouse that allows me to point and click at those. So this is sort of indicative of what we feel is a good, beautiful desktop design. Now, if I'm on the iOS, I don't wanna have dozens of fields. I don't wanna have a tremendous amount of features because my team out in the field, this is a sales tool for a medical device company. I wanna have the two or three metrics that are key to me. And be able to tap on them and see data behind that. Here's some lesser pieces that I might wanna see. Here are maybe some metrics. I wanna just tap these buttons and get to them. And then three or four areas that I wanna move around. But point being, I don't want the end user to jump into this system and have to weave my way through deep, deep, deep screens with lots of fields on them. This needs to be succinct and fast. And one of the other things you'll notice when you're using an iOS device, your thumbs are naturally gonna follow on the sides or on the bottom of the device. You'll notice we don't have a lot of buttons in the middle of the screen. We have a lot of the points that are gonna open or do things for you near the edges, just so that the user doesn't have to reach their hand over the top of the display screen, blocking most of their data to touch pieces of data that are interesting to them. And then FileMaker WebDirect, which is a technology that came about a few years ago which allows you to get your FileMaker data published into the web so that users with browser access, they don't have to have a full install of FileMaker. They can use it on their mobile phones now with FileMaker 15 and also Mac, Windows, multiple flavors of browser. But same deal, this is a less powerful environment than the full desktop version of FileMaker. So again, you wanna make your interaction, you wanna make it task specific. This is a time entry screen that we built for a customer where they can just very quickly identify three or four things, click a button to enter the current time or increment it up or down, enter that time, see their total time. So again, we don't have tremendous amount, lots of navigation, lots of folder tab panels, lots of that. This device and this environment was meant to be a very small group of users that just needed to enter time where maybe the manager of a solution needs a much bigger screen with a lot of other related areas. So again, that's where you wanna factor that into your designs. Other things to think about your security. If you're gonna have multiple users jumping into a system that you've built, you wanna identify what those roles are. Who are those people? And they talk about this in the planning guide, but who are those people and what are they doing with the data? I'm out in the field, I'm collecting data or I'm in the warehouse and I'm taking pictures of our inventory or I'm in the accounting department and I'm creating invoices. So to know what those roles are helps you define which accounts, accounts belong to people. So I wanna say Marsha in the billing department belongs to the accounting privilege set. So FileMaker provides you with accounts that are person-specific and privilege sets which are group-specific. And so therefore I can create a sort of an accounting group attach multiple people to that with their accounts and they'll all inherit the same type of security. But security very important. It's gonna determine who can do what in your system and what you need to protect. FileMaker also allows you to bind your security with your IT department's active or open directory. So if you've already got those tools in place you're gonna be able to leverage that to help manage your security better. FileMaker again, full SSL capabilities for the transmission of your data to and from your end clients. You want that to be encrypted in some industries. That's very critical. So that's a great thing to factor in. And FileMaker also has the ability to encrypt your data as it sits on the hard drive. So even if somebody were to try to attack the files themselves, you've got some extra protections there. So you wanna give thought to the security aspect. And one of the things that we just saw, well Dave just happened to build a report and it went perfectly almost. But there are times when you can build something, everything looks like it's working right and then you hand it to an end user and they push the wrong button where they enter data that's not expected or they don't have the right permissions in their security settings to do exactly what they should be able to. Casting is incredibly important and it's magnified by the amount of people that you're gonna be sharing the application with. So use a team of people. If you've got Marsha in the accounting department and Sam out in the warehouse and they have different workflows and different areas of focus, you're gonna want them to each test their areas of the system before you go live. It's sort of like you don't wanna move into a house but walk through it and turn on all the light switches, try all the water faucets, make sure the outlets are working because it's a bigger deal once you move into it and all of a sudden these things don't work, right? So from a testing standpoint, you wanna really make sure get your users involved, let them use it based on the way they work with their data. You will find little tiny rub spots or little tiny things that may not work quite right and that you can very quickly sand down and fix, polish those out and then get them back. So that's the other part too that's a real critical thing. Your testing shouldn't be, I gave it to Marsha, she found four things wrong, I fixed it, now we go live. Nope, it should be Marsha found four things, I fixed it, Marsha, can you give us another pass? Let's test that once again, make sure everything is very nice and smoothed out, everything's working right, all the different user levels are happy with it. Then to go live, you're gonna have a much more seamless and less problems with any sort of problems in your system, it's gonna be less difficult to deal with those things once everybody's in there. One of the other things waiting on the other side of this is again, we've sort of covered a good chunk in a very fast fashion of that PDF on Create. So I've planned my database, I've got some good insights on how to create it, once you're feeling good about your database and go wow, I really got this thing working well, it looks good on my iPad, looks good on my desktop, I really wanna start sharing this with my users. There's a third PDF, it's available on the FileMaker website and it's about deploying the system. And so how do I successfully get this off my laptop, put it onto a server where FileMaker server can help me host this, make it available to multiple users in real time, manage backups, manage security, and handle the kinds of things that are gonna be asked of it. So there's a really great guide that you're gonna wanna factor in that's focused on the deployment. So once you've planned it and then you've built it, you're gonna wanna kind of thumb your way through this PDF as well. It's got some really great insights again into the performance enhancements that you get with FileMaker server, some of the security benefits, the automatic backup capabilities that are built into FileMaker server. So it's a good drop in the bucket to get you focused on the right areas there and so forth. So I think if you get to the point where you're through the end of your creation side of things and you're going, wow, I'm feeling ready, I've got it well tested, et cetera, time to get out that deploy guide and start looking through that to kind of get some good best practices on how to do that safely and correctly. Excellent. So what do you think, Ryan? I think it's time to open it up to some Q&A. First of all, thank you, David, fantastic webinar, a lot of great information there. And if you guys haven't already, go to the go to webinar control panel, click on the question section, enter your question and click on send. All right, David, let's go ahead and start it off. We have a great question about setting up a script. So can you create a script to open another FileMaker database to a related record? David, are you there? Hi, I'm sorry. That's a great question. So there's two parts of that question. Can I open a related record from an existing screen using a script? Absolutely. And that does not require a separate FileMaker file. That can just be a related table inside the file. So yes, there's a go to related record script step that is used all the time by most FileMaker developers. But to answer the other question, if you have another file, maybe you have an inventory control system and you wanna be able to get to that inventory control system, maybe from your contact management system, yeah, you can absolutely create a button and then tell it, I wanna go open that file. So it's really not, I'll just show you really quickly that you can go in here, again, create a new script and just come in here and say open file right there. And once I pick that, it'll ask me where is the file, point it to it on your hard drive or on your network and FileMaker will let me open that file up from within there. So yes, absolutely. Perfect. The next question, can you touch on the differences between FileMaker Pro and FileMaker Pro Advanced? Good question. You guys might, the sharper ones of you might have noticed that I am using FileMaker Pro Advanced. FileMaker Pro out of the box lets you do, I don't know, 85% of what you need to do in the FileMaker developments sphere. It lets you create layouts. There's nothing that I've done today that can't be done in FileMaker Pro. So there are additional things in FileMaker Pro Advanced that if you're doing a lot of development, it can really be helpful. It helps things like script debugging. So for instance, if I'm in my solution here, I have the capability of turning on script debugging. And when I click my button here, it's actually gonna walk me through all of the steps in my thing and I can see where something might go wrong or whatever. So if you're having to debug your scripts, there's a data viewer, there's the ability to create a self-contained runtime files, et cetera. So there's a number of things that if you're using FileMaker Pro daily to do development, you're gonna want FileMaker Pro Advanced. But you can create good solid working databases just using FileMaker Pro out of the box. Excellent. The next question, back to scripts. If you create scripts in a file, do you have to duplicate those scripts in another file? Or can you use the same scripts? That's a good question. You can copy script steps or scripts themselves and move them between files. So let's pretend I've got a file that I put some nice navigation scripting into. I might be able to copy that and go into the alternate file, create a new script, paste that in and have almost everything work. Now, when I say almost, there are times where I might, let's just say I grabbed the report script I just created and I'm sorting on genre and artist. Well, if I copy that script into a, let's just say a contact database and I don't have a genre field or an artist field, that part of the script step is gonna be an error. So you do save yourself time by being able to copy scripts and paste them into other files, but you have to be careful that things on both sides are pretty equal or it can cause unexpected errors on the destination side of where you paste it. So very time-saving, but pay very close attention to that on the destination. Perfect. The next question about creating layouts. When you're in the new layout wizard and you choose iPad, will FileMaker note the difference in screen size when it comes to iPad Mini, iPad or an iPad Pro, or is it a best practice to create a layout for each screen size? That's a good question. I don't know that there's a perfect answer for that. You know, with the, when you do go into the layout wizard, it is going to help you as best as possible with some of these, but you also might be able to go in and lay out a custom device with based on the screen resolution of that. So I think FileMaker and their wisdom gave you some flexibility to do that. There is a possibility of creating a screen that, for instance, might work on an iPad Mini and can be stretched to fill in maybe a slightly larger iPad Pro, for instance. So you might find yourself able to use screens at both sizes that are comparable. I think you want to avoid, you know, a relatively small iPhone screen and a large iPad screen or a larger desktop screen trying to use those on devices that are just too small. You know, the power of the device may not be the same. The amount of real estate may not be the same. So FileMaker does give you the capabilities of knowing that. And if you'll notice in this script, there's an opening script and one of the very first things in this template that comes with it is, hey, what's the current platform? If I'm on a Mac, take me to the content detail screen. If I'm number three, which equals an iPad, then number three means take me to this tablet version of the layout. So FileMaker gives you some great capabilities of determining how the user is coming into your system and let me take you to the appropriate layout for that. So that's why this template has an iPhone screen, which is much smaller. It's really meant, pardon me, it's really meant to be used in more of this kind of screen real estate. And so that's the great thing about it is you have that capability of letting FileMaker help determine who's logging in and then take them to which one of the screens that you feel is gonna be appropriate for them. Perfect. All right, the next question, is it possible to create an offline FileMaker Pro app to run on smartphones and tablets? Absolutely. So FileMaker, you can build apps and solutions with FileMaker Pro or FileMaker Pro Advanced. Those are your authoring tools. But it can be deployed to the web, to the desktop, and also to iOS, iPhone, iPod Touch and iPads using FileMaker Go. So FileMaker Go is available on the App Store and is a consumption, it's a client application. It does not let you create databases, but it absolutely lets you interact with them. So you can create, edit and delete records, take pictures, capture information, even send emails and things of that nature. So can you get that database downloaded onto your mobile device and do data collection with it? Absolutely. And a lot of people do that. So you can have that database on your device and do what sort of data collection or interpretation that you want to from there. If you're part of a larger group, you have to ask the question, am I gonna collect data in the field that I then need to integrate with other data that I have for the rest of the members of my team? And so that's where you wanna decide, do I wanna have a live wireless connection to the server so that I see changes in real time and my team sees anything I do in real time? Or do I wanna have remote collection and then have some sort of sync or importing mechanism that will pull that data off my device and tuck it into the server for the rest of my team to use? That can be, that second option of the sync model can be a bit more complex to do. So you have to be careful that you don't have duplicate records being created or two people editing the same record at the same time in different parts of the country. So there's some great syncing tools that are specific for the file maker industry that can really help you with that. Perfect. The next question, is it possible to create a solution that can achieve HIPAA compliance? Absolutely. We have a number of customers, oh gosh, we have John Wayne Cancer Center and Kaiser Permanente and some other customers absolutely have to be HIPAA compliant. So yes, FileMaker has done a great job, especially with respect to SSL and encryption at rest and a lot of the authentication tools have gotten stronger and stronger with FileMaker over the years. And it's another key point. When you talk about HIPAA compliance, it's not a, this is a database check box to say it's HIPAA compliant. HIPAA compliance also factors in things like is the server room locked? Is there extra copies of the database available on hard drives laying around in the hallway? There's a lot of protocol and procedural things about all points of access to the data. So you might wanna work with somebody who's got specialty in that area to help make sure any database design and the environment that it's running in are all up to SNF so that you don't have to worry about any sort of data slip-ups in that manner. Perfect. The next question is FileMaker Go available on non-IOS devices? And if not, what are my options? FileMaker is a wholly owned subsidiary of Apple Computer. Apple Computer loves the fact that everybody in the world is jumping on their iOS devices. They're trying to keep that advantage. And I think it runs incredibly well in that space. It's a really great tool for that. For the customers out there that have, let's just say, Android devices or other things, one of the great news stories of the last 24 hours is FileMaker 15 just shipped and the web direct component of FileMaker, which allows you to share your data in a browser. That is now compatible in other mobile browsers now. So it's not just Apple. You can use Android. There's a list of compatible browser software for droid devices that you can absolutely use. So yeah, there's a good story there in that FileMaker now can welcome devices that are outside of the Apple scheme to be able to interact with FileMaker data in the mobile compliant areas. Perfect. All right, last question. David, what design tools or sites do you use for inspiration? Oh, gosh, we jump all over the web. We've got a pretty good team, a couple of our people, our artists, Jake on our team specifically, very strong, and he uses a lot of, we just look outside, we look outside of a lot of different sources for our artwork and so forth. So I wouldn't say, I'm gonna just show you, just kind of a quick thing. We've got a number of really nice screens that we put a lot of attention into. So we really try to look at the customer and how they're working with their data. We try to keep our devices modern looking and specific to the area that they are trying to work in, but there are some great applications. I like looking at weather applications and I like looking at notepad applications on the App Store because they give me some really good insights in how some designs are changing and so forth. So especially for the iOS, you can just Google top 30 iOS designs and get some really good insights there. The Google design guide, the Apple design guide, they all have good inspirations. They're great resources for how to identify different controls and different ways of presenting your data and different ways of interacting with the data. So there's a treasure trove of design tools out there, but I would start by just Googling great iOS designs or great Mac application designs or whatever and see what shows up. Excellent answer. All right, that's all the time that we have for today. On behalf of David and Fawmaker, it was our absolute pleasure chatting with you guys and we definitely hope to see you on another webinar soon. Have a great day. Thank you.