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Website development invoice example for non-profit organizations

in this video we're gonna start a conversation about tearing apart and learning from filemaker's free invoice starter solution that's part of filemaker 14 now upfront I want to be very clear about this starter solution this starter solution may say starter solution but under the hood it's really advanced and if you're a brand new FileMaker developer you're gonna be quickly in over your head as you begin to try to take this tool apart and learn from this tool so if you're a new filemaker user you can watch this video but if you want to learn on your own I suggest you start with other starter solutions that are more simple and what do I mean by complex well first off this starter solution was not engineered in mind with brand new people who are new to the FileMaker platform it was designed as a learning tool and the learning that can go on inside of this is designed for anyone from an intermediate to an advanced FileMaker developer so what are we gonna do in this video well this video is all about scripting it's about scripting popovers it's about scripting slide controls within popovers it's about adding related records to your database and we're also going to cover some information about script parameters and variables we're also going to discuss using value lists to pass multiple field values into a single script parameter something that's not necessarily obvious to most beginning and intermediate FileMaker users the first off is a quick overview I'm gonna go to field definitions here and show you what we're dealing with in this video we're only going to be focused on the invoices invoice data and products tables within the invoices starter solution now if you're familiar with other FileMaker solutions sometimes you'll see invoice data referred to as invoice line items so that's what this table is right here it's the line items on your invoice of course one record here in invoices equals an invoice and one record here in products equals a product so it's pretty straightforward if I go to relationships I want to show you what we're gonna be focusing on we're gonna be focusing on this teo right here these two TOS right here and this one right here these four are the only ones that were really gonna concern ourselves with just for this training so let me open up an invoice right here and let's dive in let me show you this piece of functionality first and then we'll go through how it was built and odds are you're gonna learn something along the way so first off this is a button right here this button right here is actually a popover button and it pops up a popover window right here now by default this popover windows going to show us all the products that are in our product table I only have three sample records in there and these of course aren't very descriptive but each one would have a price and you can actually select this item and add it to your invoice that's pretty cool now some customers start to get lots of products in their system you can actually go in here and if you knew that you were looking for some sort of hoagie h OG and press return key filemaker is set up to filter this information right here and just give us the matching records or we can select once again the item that we're looking for of course that's fairly straightforward we can also look for services that are loaded within the product database so it's not just products but also services now this button at the top is pretty slick this allows us to on-the-fly add a new product to this database so I can say magical widget as you can see we have a magical widget that turns water into gold coins and at forty five dollars that's a pretty good deal but we definitely want to mark this up so we make a nice healthy profit on it we're also gonna notate that it's taxable once we're done here I can say done it adds a magical widget to our invoice on our invoice line items here it also adds it to our product database right here as you can see the magic widget has been added automatically pretty slick so how does all this work so first off this whole system that we've just showed you operates across these four scripts right here that's it now unfortunately these scripts aren't commented so that's why it's handy to have someone like me help you tear it apart an easiest way to learn how all this works is to use your copy a filemaker pro advanced turn-on script debugger and then activate the system and watch what happens so if i press this button right here this pops up initially no script was activated when i select product we start to get scripts that are active in here i can step into and run the script pretty straightforward and then i can of course add maybe another magical widget and i can step through now of course at this point a number of scripts all fire i'm going to take the opportunity to show you what's going on here first off it's important to note that this button right here doesn't activate a script it simply brings up this popover right here this popover if you double click it actually has a script trigger attached to it it actually calls this script called popover ad product item now what's interesting about this is that when this starter solution was developed it was decided by filemaker to have three different situations actually all call the same script now some people like to do this when you're doing development they prefer to call one script and have that script do logical determinations to determine what's going on I on the other hand typically like to be somewhat more verbose and I would rather write three separate scripts for each scenario you can actually end up writing more scripts but when reverse engineering are making corrections it's sometimes a lot easier to have things separated and itemized that being said closing this window right here runs the popover ad product item script selecting the item off the list will also run the same script as well and lastly in the third situation pressing the done button right here will actually activate that script as well there's three separate scenarios one scenario is where we've created a new product one scenario is where we've selected an item off the portal to add and the last scenario is where we've just clicked out of the area and dismissed the popover entirely I'm going to bring up the script and take a look at what we have going on it's somewhat better to comment all this stuff out but just to give you an idea what's going on and maybe get you started looking at this the search field is here at the top when this script runs it clears your previous search if you had one the next thing it does is it forces a script refresh now the reason this is required is that frequently when you set up a filter here in FileMaker this does not always refresh itself automatically when the filter criteria change therefore frequently it's important to force FileMaker to refresh the screen it's just the way this function behaves we talked about this in more length in my filemaker pro video training course that being said any time you see a perform script trigger refresh which they're in here a couple times in different places this is specifically designed to force that portal to refresh with the latest information now right here is where it gets interesting and we have our three possible scenarios remember we said we called the script from three different situations well if we call this script because we're actually dismissing this dialogue there won't be any script parameters at all past when this script is activated and therefore it will actually start the eff statement here ignore this else--if statement here and then we'll exit the script right here now what's also interesting is that there are two slide controls right here slide control one it's like control two each of these slide controls also have a title slide control one is called select product panel the second slide control is new product panel and so what we do right here is we'll actually determine if the new product panel is the front panel that's a get layout object attribute function and filemaker is front panel is a reserved string that will tell us either true or false whether this object is the front panel if that's the case then we go through this situation right here if we're actually creating a new product we'll execute this scenario right here now I want to point something out real quick we have this variable called selected item and it's variable is a local variable which means that we define it during the course of this script once these scripts halt this value will be dropped out of memory and FileMaker it's a very temporary variable we use it and then we chuck it out the window when we're done and what we're interested in capturing is the product name and the ID of the product we set those into a value list and we assign that to Dollar selected underscore item now what do we mean by this well this gets into passing script parameters once again this is a little bit more advanced but understand that one script can call another script when one script calls another script a single block of text can be passed from one script to the other script that's called a script parameter now if you have lots of different values that you want to pass maybe four or five different fields or values maybe you want to say someone's first name and their last name and their city state zip address well it's all gonna go as one block a text which can make for a mess you'd like to be able to individually identify those items well how do you do that one of the coolest and easiest ways is using a list function the list function allows you to actually build a value list now I know that we're going pretty fast here with this explanation so if you've never heard of script parameters before or the list function before we dive into this more deeply at somewhat a slower pace and our filemaker pro training series and i keep mentioning that but it's important to understand that if you're confused there are additional resources to help get you up to speed in this situation we press a button right here we actually call this script but we also pass a script parameter we actually build the value list on the fly right here we say take the product name right here and also grab the product ID number which we need that that's the key field inside the system you put both of those in a value list that look like this because we have a value list each line represents a different value for a different variable or a different field pretty slick so that way we have one block of text but we can actually load in multiple values of course the flip side of this is we have to retrieve that information out of the system and how do we do that right here when we get to the point where we're actually going to create the new item we're gonna go to a field in the portal that's an important tip the next thing you're gonna do is go to the last portal row this causes FileMaker to create a new related record then you're gonna extract those two items from that stashed value list that stashed value list came across in a script parameter but then we took the script parameter and loaded it into the variable so then what we do is we run this function called get value get value allows us to suck specific positions or specific values out of a value list and send them on their merry way so in this case we're gonna grab from this variable position 1 and we're gonna load it here in this field which is on the invoice line items the product description and then we're going to get positioned to from the variable and we're gonna load that in the product ID field and next we leave the customer at the quantity field so let's watch this activate I'm gonna run the script debugger real quick I'm gonna say let's create a new line I'm gonna select the Joe hoagie item and select it knows that we are calling our script and we have this script parameter right here I can click there and now we're running the script just like we talked about we come down now it runs the trigger to refresh the portal to make sure we have a fresh update on the portal then we see that it's not empty so then we set the script parameter that was passed from that button over here to the script parameter over here that we capture using get script parameter we drop that into our variable continue forward it's gonna skip all that code skip this scenario here skip this scenario here we talked about those now it's gonna reset right here this pop-up window and reset the slide panel to the correct panel then it closed the popover now because it closed the popover it's free running the script so the script actually call itself but because the script call itself when the window is dismissed it's gonna exit out this scenario right here remember three different scenarios can call this script so it skips that one and then right here it exits now we're back to our original script which was processing all this and then we say step into the field on the portal it has to be a field in the portal next step go to the last record which is what we just did okay next insert the product name and lastly insert the product ID which you actually don't see there it's hidden from screen but it's there and lastly we drop the user into the quantity field so this is a pretty slick setup and I wanted to walk you through this hopefully this will give you a little bit of an idea of some cool functionality that's part of the FileMaker starter solution maybe you learned a little bit here and maybe along the way you'll learn how to take these scripts apart use a script debugger and FileMaker Pro Advanced to step through these scripts to learn how they work if you'd like to learn more about building your own FileMaker solutions or becoming more of a power user with FileMaker and learning how to make some customizations yourself feel free to check out our filemaker pro video training course at learning FileMaker com you