Monthly archive: September, 2009

I was looking for a way to select all records with a particular field that is empty for my FM Pro app. In SQL, I just enter “SELECT * FROM tbl_my_info WHERE field1 IS NULL”. Pretty simple, huh? Well, FM Pro has its own vagaries. It took way too long, but I was able to find someone else’s post about the same search. Their answer, simply go to the “Find” mode and enter a equals sign (=) in the field of interest. This has the effect of telling FM Pro that you want all records that have this field empty.

There you go. That wasn’t too hard was it?

It has been many years since I have used FileMaker Pro. In fact, I all but swore it off the last time I used it. Why? Well, back then I was still self-employed and one of our first clients wanted to take an existing FileMaker Pro application and turn it into a web app. Simple enough I thought. Wrong boyo! Long and short of it, FileMaker Pro was not good at exporting in a way that MySQL could import. Long project, never finished.

Fast forward to this month. I have been working on getting an existing application to work with new features mandated by our production team. We are outsourcing some aspects of our operation and need to track those persons involved from outside the office. Not too bad. In the time I have been on the project, about two weeks, my appreciation for FileMaker Pro has been reestablished. It may not get everything done, but it works well for the in-house projects so many of use need to get done and off our desks.