May 2010
Beginner to intermediate
915 pages
33h 1m
English
Content preview from FileMaker Pro 11: The Missing ManualBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 16. Advanced Scripting
Being familiar with FileMaker’s lengthy list of script steps is a great foundation, but putting together a workable script takes practice. Although some scripts are simple affairs, sometimes a script requires a lot of forethought, planning, and organization. FileMaker gives you tools to help you write scripts and troubleshoot them when they aren’t working. Plus, you can organize and document your work as you go. In this chapter you’ll pull these concepts together to learn how to write and manage complex scripts.
Note
Download this chapter’s sample file from this book’s Missing CD page at www.missingmanuals.com/cds. Use Invoices_START.fp7 to work inl use Invoices_FINISHED.fp7 to see the completed examples.
Commenting Scripts
When you look at a script someone else created—or you created a long time ago—you can’t always tell what the script does. To help keep things clear, add comments to your script. You add each comment using a Comment script step. This step has just one option: the text of the comment itself. The Comment step is special for two reasons. First, it doesn’t do anything. Second, it appears in bold when you view your script in the Edit Script window.
Use comments to document anything important about the script. Here are some things you may want to include in a comment or set of comments:
What the script does.
Who wrote the script.
The date the script was written.
The date, if any, the script was last edited.
Who edited the script.
Anything special ...
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I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.