Technical Details for the ACF-Plugin
You can click on any topic in the left sidebar for reference. Additionally, you'll find programming examples under the "Examples" section to help you get started.
Deployment-Friendly Solution
In a traditional FileMaker Solution, updating a deployed solution at a customer site typically involves changing scripts, layouts, and database definitions. This process can be tedious and time-consuming. Alternatively, you might choose to migrate all customer data into a new solution and re-implement custom code—a similarly laborious task.
ACF simplifies the update process significantly. Updating code within ACF functions is straightforward. You can either load the new compiled functions into the solution using simple cut-and-paste or a small script. Alternatively, you can utilize the document service to load binaries from a web service to which you've deployed the code. This web service supports encryption to ensure the code's integrity has not been compromised.
With just a click of a button, users can reload ACF binaries themselves, immediately gaining access to the updated functionality.
Code Portability: A Vital Consideration
One crucial aspect of development projects is the use of portable code segments—code that can be reused wherever needed. In a FileMaker script, achieving code portability can be challenging because script logic is often tied to its position in the relationship graph. This means that all field references used in the script must match the layout's position in the relationship graph.
For example, consider a scenario where you have a "Documents" table related to both "Orders" and "Invoices." You may have documents related to both or individually, all stored in the same table. In this case, the relationship from the invoice table is named "invoice_documents," while the relationship from the orders table is named "orders_documents." This leads to the necessity of maintaining two duplicate sets of nearly identical scripts—one for orders and another for invoices. These scripts are designed to work with field references specific to either orders or invoices, making them far from portable.
ACF addresses this challenge by enabling the creation of portable code. Advanced Custom Functions (ACF) do more than just offer custom functions; they often replace entire scripts or groups of scripts. Portable code created with ACF can save you significant development time because:
- There's no need to rewrite the same code repeatedly.
- Portable code is already tested and known to work reliably.
- ACF functions can be enhanced and seamlessly included in different projects without the need to modify scripts or update customer solutions.
Creating genuinely portable code does require some planning, and a few factors to consider include:
- The use of function parameters to prevent dependencies on the relationship graph.
- Utilizing SQL functions to retrieve, update, or insert data, querying the base-table instance instead of the relationship graph instance.
- When pulling data from the current layout, you can supply the relationship instance as a string to the ACF function, allowing it to build field names dynamically instead of relying on constant field names.
How This Manual Is Created
This manual consists of a collection of static HTML pages. The source text is initially authored using "Lightpaper" in Markdown format, which facilitates the inclusion of code samples and enables formatting for the manual pages.
Next, the Markdown source is integrated into a small FileMaker 17 application that incorporates functions written in the new language designed for Advanced Custom Functions. You can explore these functions in the example section of this manual or download the application from our website, see the "demo" section of this manual.
These functions serve to convert the Markdown-formatted manual pages into HTML format. Subsequently, the HTML files are dissected and organized into a structured layout featuring a left navigation bar, a top navigation bar, and a list of pages within the left navigation bar.
The final step involves cross-referencing the HTML text with other titles in the manual to generate links to the corresponding manual pages. If a phrase within the text matches the title of another document, it becomes a clickable link leading to that specific page.
All these components are then merged and saved to create the HTML files once more.
When new pages are added, we systematically loop through all the document records in the database, generate HTML files, and upload them to the web. This process ensures that all left navigation menus are updated across all documents. Remarkably, the entire operation of generating approximately 50 documents takes less than one second.