FileMaker Pro development can be tedious for the advanced developer. It's all GUI based development tools are often a burden. Fortunately, thanks to the extensive implementation of copy and paste of objects in the latest FileMaker releases, a very smart company, myFMbutler, was able to create the tool I waited for years : myFMbutler Clip Manager 3.0Among many things, it lets you edit every FileMaker object you can copy & paste (scripts, fields, layouts…) as text !
What it does is to convert the binary XML that FileMaker generates when you copy an object to textual XML that you can then edit as you want, and then transform it back to FileMaker clipboard that you can paste back in FileMaker !
The possibilities are endless, and what would takes you hours to do, can be done in seconds !
But before the 3.0 release you couldn't script Clip Manager with AppleScript. In fact even in late 3.0 ß you couldn't script it. So I asked myFMbutler to make it AppleScriptable and in one hour after my mail, I got an alpha release with AppleScript support, and in one day a pretty much final one with many more AppleScript commands ! How awesome is that company ?
In fact, I'm so impressed and grateful to them that this is the reason why I started this blog : to show them that it wasn't a waste of time to add this AppleScript support and to show you how FileMaker Pro development can be much quicker with a bit of AppleScript and Clip Manager. And maybe we could start a community sharing scripts and tricks to speed up FileMaker Pro development.
So I hope you'll excuse me about this endorsement, but Clip Manager will be an essential tool for many tips I will post here.
1 comment:
I agree. Clip Manager is a "must have". And it even should work with custom functions, though there seems to be some minor bug there. When copying a custom function (at least with German localized FM Advanced 9v03/Mac OS 10.5.5) the resulting XML is somehow mixed up and most of the time invalid. The name of the cf becomes the parameter, the calculation is copied as the "name" (which easily lead to double quotes) and the calculation-section is empty. But when fixing this manually in the XML the pasting at least works perfectly and that alone is help enough.
A very useful tool, long waited for ...
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