Keep Your FileMaker Pro Custom Functions Organised

Working in any kind of development environment is challenging enough, but when you allow yourself to become untidy or disorganised it becomes hell on wheels.

As developers we often fall into the trap of not practising what we preach, we spend 101% of our lives organising other people’s data and often forget to organise our own.

Alex Babkov, one of the FileMaker Developers that I admire, said in an article not so long ago that FileMaker developers rarely make solutions for themselves that come anywhere close to the quality of the solutions we make for clients. I think that’s true, certainly in my own case in the past, and in many instances I have witnessed with other developers I’ve worked with and around.

However, some solutions that we write for ourselves don’t actually need to be prime quality like the solutions that we make for clients. Perhaps that’s because the clients are never going to see them. It’s no different to a lot of web developers that I know that make unbelievably good front end web sites, but, if you saw the backend admin areas you’d think they’d never coded a line in their life.

We are “make-doers” with our own stuff, because we know how to “fiddle” it, bend it, and force it. And, if none of that works – there’s always the Dataviewer

So, one particular area we need to keep tabs on is stuff like custom functions amongst other similar things. A few years ago now I spent just a couple of hours building a ridiculously simple solution for housing my custom functions. It was shown briefly in my earlier screencast post an introduction to custom functions.

So I thought I would share that file for the benefit of beginners and starters with FileMaker Pro, just so you don’t fall into that dirty untidy trap called chaos.

You can download the file here: Custom Functions Library

There is a catch though, I’ve taken out the custom functions that I use and just given you a file with a single simple custom function in it just to show you how the file should be built up. Afterall, I wouldn’t want to kill-joy all of those hours you’ll spend downloading or writing custom functions in the future. (you’ll thank me for it )

Just to be clear, you won’t learn an awful lot from the file itself, it is very basic in its construct, but it’s very useful in its function as a custom function store, or it certainly has been for me. I store a copy in my Dropbox so that I can access it wherever I go.

No doubt the FileMaker Pro 11 users amongst you will be aware that you can now import custom functions from one file to another. That’s all well and good, but you should have a central repository for your functions. At some point you’ll have dozens upon dozens of them and you won’t want to be storing/importing all of those across every solution that you make.

And that’s not to mention adjusting and updating your master copy, if all of your functions are in all of your files – then which ones are the masters?

Enjoy, see you soon and leave a comment below.

About the Author: Darren Lunn is on a mission to help new FileMaker Pro developers to become competent FileMaker Pro Developers. You can connect with Darren on Twitter

Related posts:

1. Introduction to FileMaker Pro Custom Functions
2. How To Download & Install A FileMaker Pro Custom Function

Tagged as: Database Development, Organising Data, Staying Tidy