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It’s useful in relationships and summary counts.Īnd finally, I include an auto-enter number field that records the number of times the record has been modified, giving me a sense of the volume of activity that each record has experienced. I also add a field that always contains the value 1. Can you think of any standard utility fields which make more sense to set up as calculations than as auto-enter fields? I’d love to hear about them in the comments. To give an example of a calculation, I’m exposing FileMaker’s internal record ID, though normally I’d set it up as an auto-enter field. I also prefer to record the host timestamp rather than the local timestamp of the user, as this helps keep data consistent when users are in multiple time zones. And because I have a thing for parallel grammar (I believe that it reduces cognitive load), I call the timestamp fields “z_CreatedOn” and “z_ModifiedOn” to match “z_CreatedBy” and “z_ModifiedBy”. I prepend a “z_” to them to group them together as utility fields. I’ve found that requiring these fields to have a value has gotten me into hot water, so I also remove that requirement from all of them.Īlso, while I rely heavily on the standard metadata fields such as Creation Timestamp, CreatedBy, ModificationTimestamp, and ModifiedBy, I make some tweaks to them: Now that the FileMaker Migration Tool helps to coordinate serial numbers during data migrations, I find that I prefer serial numbers to UUIDs, so I make that auto-enter change too. The resulting table should include only those fields that you want as your defaults.įor example, I like my primary key to start with “_pk_TableName” so that’s what I call the field (substituting the actual table name later). Modify the fields in this table to meet your requirements, changing, deleting, and adding fields as you choose.If you have not, select File > Manage > Database… to open this dialog. If you have enabled the preference Use Manage Database dialog to create files, the Manage Database dialog appears. Name your file DefaultFieldsTemplate.fmp12 and click the Save button.Select the Blank option and click the Create button.A FileMaker Pro dialog window appears, showing various file options. In FileMaker Pro 19, select File > Create New to start creating a new file.Get the Sample Filesĭownload the sample files to follow along with with my instructions. One way to figure that out is to create the fields in a new file, export an XML representation of that file, and analyze the portion of the XML representing the fields you created. Of course, the tricky part is getting the XML correct. You can modify them, remove them, or add new ones with appropriate XML representations of the fields you’d like to have created automatically. The customization process simply involves making changes to the nodes. Open it up in a text editor, and you will see XML with the following structure: Once you have located the default file, copy it to your desktop or another location where you can edit it. Choose whichever one matches your language preference in FileMaker Pro. Each of these folders contains its own FMDefaultFields.xml file. * You will see a series of localized directories such as English, Spanish, and Japanese.
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