24 December, 2014

Informing developers with FileMaker developer conventions

One of the advantages for FileMaker developers is that they have the liberty to create and modify apps rapidly without any need to deal with the concerns that bother the other developers. The FileMaker Development Conventions (FDC) was created to promote professionalism as well as consistency for the all the solutions developed. In addition the FDC also offers full fledged guidelines on where to begin and which features might evolve in the long run.

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While employing an interactive approach for designing, a FileMaker tool will allow you to modify and extend the functionalities inspite of the dependencies present in the solutions. What the developers should keep in mind is that the more complex the solution, more difficult it will be to maintain. While working in a team environment the FileMaker Conventions and Standards will be especially helpful. The applications are easy to handle as well as developer friendly. What is actually important while dealing with naming conventions and standards is that the developers must be consistent throughout the process. The conventions are not meant to guide the professionals how to develop the solutions.

Relationship Graph for the Table Occurrence
This is one of the most vital things that the developers must keep in mind. In order to determine the standard for the relationship graph is critical to ensure readability since this tool is driven by context. The main aim should to avoid printing out the relationship graph. There are several times when the developers create the table occurrence names without making use of a naming convention. Therefore, using this will allow the professionals greater flexibility.

About Layouts
The relationship and table occurrence standards will guide actual standard to be chosen with the layout names. As far as layouts and separation models are concerned, the solutions might be further broken down into several files for the ease of consolidation. Depending on the development model and methods solutions can be provided for data that has only an interface file, separating files or business logic file for each of the module.

Field Naming Convention
There are several standards that can be adopted in this segment. The first is the use of Lower Camel Case Naming. Here the compound words and phrases are written without using any spaces. Each of the word is also capitalized. It helps in maintaining the SQL compatibility and avoids the uses of spaces in field names. It also keeps the field lengths to a minimum character.

The next is the keys. All the key fields will begin with an underscore that is followed by ‘k’ and finally the field type follows. Appropriate naming of field will offer self documentation. This is also known as metadata. This would be quite resourceful. The field name can also be begun with a field name that will prove beneficial when the fields are alphabetically sorted. In this case, the key field will appear at the top.

Naming the derived data fields also helps to create metadata on the field level. If the field order while sorting alphabetically appears as key fields, user fields, derived fields and non-record level fields, then proves to be a great benefit because while working on the solution the field name will provide metadata to the developer depending on the kind of field they are working on.

Scripts
The Comment Script step is recommended in order to store the documentation. While working in a team environment maintaining this convention is very important. The more complex a solution, the more comments are required. In this regard, it is important to remember that all the scripts must include an Exit Script at the end. While debugging these it is better to ensure that the final result of the scripts are visible to the developers.

Besides the terminating scripts, navigation is also important. Navigation must always be scripted so as to avoid the use of Go to Layout button. This will provide several benefits as for the future the navigation changes will only require a single script rather than altering several buttons on many layouts.

The flexibility offered by FileMaker Pro provides has led to the creation of several redundant but several standards. Developers often use standards that might alter from each one of them. The professionals are tied to their specific methods and preferences. Moreover, putting down a rigid FDC might also prove to be counter-productive. Therefore, basic guidelines are all that are required to establish for naming conventions. This will serve as the beginning point which can be converted into richer solutions and meet the rising demand for design methods.

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