FileMaker For Beginners
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FileMaker For Beginners
FileMaker For Beginners
Warning this broadcast is for mature audiences only do not attempt to perform similar stunts with your own filemaker servers unless you're trying to get the attention of your boss the server crashes in today's broadcast are performed by certified professionals do not attempt this at home viewer discretion is advised [Laughter] well that's a good way to start a friday hi i'm richard carlton creator of fm training. tv where we blow up filemaker servers and just to emphasize the fact that this broadcast is not sponsored or endorsed or is the opinion of apple or claire's or anyone else who might be a fortune 100 company we just blew up the product so and they really hate it when we do that so richie garlton here welcome everyone it's going to be a very awesome day today so i wanted to frame the conversation today and get things going here a little bit and so what i'm doing is i'm going to quickly go through the opening slideshow
here and some of you didn't understand how this all came about and so i wanted to figure today is the last day of our enterprise deployments with the filemaker platform and uh and so i wanted to kind of phrase what happened so um back in may sometime i got this call said hey richard did you know that we are now enterprise i'm like we're what we're enterprise i'm like what are you talking about right and i said well i they had this uh news article and it wasn't just one it was several uh where uh claire's management has been out touting and advertising that they are now an enterprise software company and i'm like really so of course you if you read the this is msnbc or whatever but it was posted to numerous locations etc and i was like wow really and so then of course we kept reading kept reading in it and it you know directly implies that uh clarisse's enterprise
um but there's like a little bit thin on the the details and so i was like well if we would be enterprised we can help clarisse you know make the case for that but i've never really done a super enterprise kind of thing and so i said i called up jesse and said hey only way i know to get to the enterprise is with 360 works product right so it was funny because i posted a notice about this today saying hey we're trying to show claire's how to be enterprise right because it's not really enterprise the product and market is not enterprise even though they're saying hey we're enterprise right the product by itself cannot get to the enterprise the only way to get the enterprise is with right a third-party product which is great it's inexpensive but you know just understand the mechanics here so i got a hold of jesse barnum and said hey so if clarus is making statements that they're the enterprise um i
mean i guess we should help them a little bit right makes sense um and so we can help you know demonstrate the fact that they are truly enterprise and jesse goes oh yeah yeah no problem we could totally do that because we have the products that do that and so uh we're going to be demoing that today so today's broadcast once again i'm richard carlton creator of fmtrain. tv a lot of you already know who i am obviously for those of you who don't know who i am i'm the richard right um and in some places that i'm the only blank blank richard because they don't like me and then some places it's okay like jesse's like he kind of likes me a little bit um so uh so today's broadcast is sponsored by fmtrain. tv where we create great live training broadcasts like this one right here every day at one o'clock business days not saturdays and sundays generally and so we talk about things in the
filemaker platform if you go to fmtrain. tv and you press the live training tab down at the bottom you'll be able to see the upcoming broadcast schedule across the bottom here this is data that's coming out of filemaker that's called eating your own dog food right when you build a product and then you use your own product it's called eating your own dog food the sign of a great company is when it eats its own dog food right does jesse barnum actually use the products that he creates we should ask him in a little bit right i think he probably does um and so that part of it is awesome now keep in mind we are uh broadcasting on high definition to discord to youtube and to twitch uh twitch is generally um if you're just gonna jump in once or twice and that's it that's fine if you want to come and have more of an ongoing conversation with uh people who are here a lot then you
want to visit discord i'm sure that uh tk55678 has already done it he's posted the 24 hour invite link it's only good for 24 hours to the channel i will post it to momentarily and then scrolling down here if you want to help us support this channel it's important right because this five days of broadcast it up but it's like 160 to 180 a day in uh fees i think it's going to be closer to i was telling the wife it's like how big is this bill going to be that's going to hit my american express bill just to demo the enterprise right it's actually probably closer to 1500 to 2 000 bucks i was laughing so anyway i just like pin my i pin my nose and don't don't look at it because i think it's valuable for all of you to see this you understand that filemaker can be taken to the enterprise um and really that's the only way without spending about a million dollars
and i mean that very seriously um if if you want to take it to the enterprise in a reliable way and make good on the statements that were in the press release or the news article from msnbc then you've got to use basically this product or one that where someone stole it and is reselling it or so i don't know i mean you have to basically use mirsync i don't know any other product that will really do this and and of course buying it is always a preferred mechanism and so if you want to support the channel and keep the funds going here so we can continue to do these live broadcasts which are free definitely check out our website right here and select the bundle and purchase one of our training bundles it's really awesome we greatly appreciate it and we're getting towards filemaker at devcon right filemaker devcon except they call it engage now and it's all virtual it's all online it's virtual and so
all the vendors typically we get together and we start doing these devcon deals so if you want the devcon deal you can get a double of our bundles for like a lot of money off it's much cheaper uh so to go to this link here bitly bit. ly forward slash fm double and you can get uh one year for one user for two years like a two year deal and it's all it's a copy of our training copy of our special crm copy of filemaker pro 19 for mac or windows pretty cool or you can get it for two users for one year now jesse barnum is here he's awesome he makes this stuff that works on the enterprise and specifically jesse has a deal some of you have already taken up on this deal i know that certain very very large corporations have been buying this right certain fruit companies that start that rem that let's see the uh they rhyme with maple right so if
you know a fruit company that rhymes with maple they are using this software right we can't say who that is because that would be some sort of an official endorsement which is not allowed um but mapple is using this software and uh if scott's there michael scott i think he's here it's a pretty cool stuff and that number of people have been buying this deal this gets you 15 off basically off the software that allows filemaker to be pushed at the enterprise um and so i don't really think you can get the enterprise reasonable sort of way without something like this uh this product has been in market for about jesse it's been like 10 years with this product how long has that been with you with this product yeah it's i think we started working on it in 2011. yeah so it's effectively 10 years it might as well just round it up it's a rounding error so 10 years of him building it understanding
the world of sync getting better at the world of sync other other companies kind of dabble with sync a little bit but this is a major focus is probably your number one product if i had to guess if it's not okay yeah i would think it's your number one product um and so this gets you a discount off of it people are buying this jesse was like wow people are buying i said yeah because this is an awesome training venue he's like ah yeah richard no one watches richard you people are stupid no so anyway so that's exactly what it is that's what he said yesterday ken has a question when you set up a new spoke uh and it sends the file for the first time is it sending all the data in the file or does it piece it does it piece it out as the sink happens yeah so um kind of uh there's a few parts to that answer the the short answer
is yes it sends the entire file um so and especially like in this case with filemaker enterprise uh fm starting point enterprise edition it's a single file it has no external container data so when we push that out what's happening is we are pausing the file on the hub making a copy of that file resuming the file the nice thing about the pause versus the close is that we don't kick any users out on the hub so we could actually run this and make a copy of the file and there would just be a very short momentary pause where users couldn't write to the database but nobody would get kicked out then we zip that file push it to the spoke server and then open that up on the spoke server using fms admin and then and then we tell filemaker to host that file let's say you have a multi-file solution uh our largest sync solution that we have for our largest customer has about
30 files uh and i think one of the files is about 250 gigabytes uh and the others collectively add up to another 300 gigabytes so it's about 550 gigs that file takes about that whole solution takes about eight hours for the initial sync and the majority of that time is not the sync the majority of the time is just compressing and moving the files from one server to another so what we do to try to speed that up is that if it's a multi-file solution we will start a multi-threaded process where we will compress the first file send that to this to the spoke server and while that's still sending we start compressing the other files in the background so that we're not having to wait for all of them to compress and then all of them to send so basically uh and we do it in descending order so we'll send the smallest files first and they go quick and while they're sending we're compressing the larger
files behind it to try to just keep stacking the network as fast as we can the other thing that is not uh just to add a little complexity to that answer is that everything i'm saying is for server to server syncs if you're talking about a server to client sync we have the option when you give your users a here let me show you on my screen right now so i've got a mobile configuration i don't know if we want to demo that or not i'll leave that up to richard but you can demo whatever the hell you want people are starting to log in and we do have a couple other random questions oh that's fine but ken's yeah you're doing great just keep it up so i've got a mobile configuration which is the same database and when i click the download database button we recommend usually using this create link option and what this does is it's basically going to create a url that we can
then email or text or whatever we want to do a post on a web page or something we're going to get a url that somehow we send to our users and then those users will be able to use that url to download their mobile offline copy of the database so you don't need to go into server admin close the file like put it on s3 or dropbox or whatever and point users to there you can do that if you want but this download url makes it a little more convenient and what i wanted to call attention to relevant to the question that was asked was this choice here full copy or empty clone you have the choice to pick an empty clone that way the user is getting just the empty file with just the schema the layouts but no data and then on the initial sync it'll pull the records in that apply to them i wouldn't recommend doing the empty clone if you're giving them
the full copy if correct all the records yeah database i was waiting for you to say why that's important if you if you're if you're just thinking ken like if you're syncing an ipad down or a laptop down for just one person you want to send the records just they want and if you have a database with all the records in it then that's kind of a waste right so yeah so let's say each user only gets their own records and no user has more than one percent of the records in the database you would definitely get a faster sync by picking the empty clone option they get an empty file and then they're they're pulling in one percent of the records as opposed to giving them the entire file and then on the initial sync we delete 99 of what they have so that's an option that only applies for mobile uh syncs and not for service services okay thanks for the question yeah good question so
then uh this is from a gentleman from yesterday or a person from essay d the likes right we're back to that again me trying to pronounce words uh this is uh uh i guess it's what is the uh i guess uh what is the difference between syncing to mysql um to filemakers to from filemaker server to mysql or dynamodb and i the dynamodb is like a multi-hour conversation to rewire everyone's headers too i sat there with jesse at defcon the last real defcon and he did a brain dump on me on dynamodb and it blew my mind it was really awesome but it is a very alien concept yeah it's something like alien there basically and so it doesn't like in terms of what a relational database like if you really learn filemaker and you go to sql you kind of get it right you really do but when you go to dynamodb no negative i will say this there is a significant learning curve to understanding
how dynamodb works but as far as the nursing part of it it's actually easier to sync a database with dynamo than it is with virtually anything else because dynamo doesn't have fields and so you don't need to set up any tables or fields you just sync and whatever we give it it stores so it's actually extremely straightforward to set up a dynamodb sync yeah definitely alien stuff there uh ken says thank you for answering the question about the download etc on the uh the sync right so yeah let me make sure we address dave's question there um about the my sequel the only thing that would be different is that if i was syncing with my sql i would do the exact same i didn't get enough configurations when i set up this demo to do more than five so uh i'll have to just talk through it i'll have to talk through it but but you know what actually i can just show you right on the
screen here let me edit this so this is my hub you guys have all seen this before if you were on the previous days the next screen is going to tell me to create the layouts and then the next screen is the interesting part so here if i'm syncing with mysql all i do is i pick my sql here and then i put in you know whatever using my password wouldn't do root probably but um and then this isn't gonna well hold on and uh i'm not sure if i've got the right firewalls and stuff like that set up for our mysql server right now but the point is is that it looks like we are hitting a firewall problem because this should have finished by now but the point is is that this is the only screen that's different you pick this screen and you put in your my sql connection information and then everything after that is the same as what your yeah that's
the firewall uh everything after that is the same as what you're already used to it's going to ask you you know the same questions about bi-directional sync how do you want to merge conflicts uh that kind of stuff so that's the only difference what if you're doing a mysql oracle microsoft sql server if you're using a generic jdbc database here's the dynamo page you set up your access key your secret like i said dynamo is actually the easiest one of all of them all you need is an access key a secret key in which region you want um here's redshift and i'll need to figure what what has gone on there and then here's salesforce salesforce is also pretty straightforward to set up um so after the screen the rest of it is all the same um i do have a i i guess it's a kind of a question statement then we should probably go into the conversation about latency and play with that for a
little bit um so elso i don't know who has a really uh a practical need for this or maybe he does i don't know but he asked the question well what's the this is the question he asked what is the largest possible number of connections in between servers and mirrorsync and i'm thinking he means the number of servers between the uh what's the maximum number of servers i think that's what he's written the most servers i've ever set up is right now uh you know we i've done i've done pretty extensive testing on how many clients you can sync we've gotten up to i think 300 syncing clients um and it was still running fine we could have kept adding more but i didn't want to pay for more ec2 test instances actually uh and so i don't know what the max is for clients i've tested up to 300. for servers there is no hard limit built in but this is the biggest test
we've ever done we've got five servers here um but uh i think i think you could probably probably se i think you do seven or eight or ten pretty easily from what i can see so i don't see any reason why not uh what what you would start to run into the more servers you get the more likelihood that one of them is going to be very slow if one of them is down it's not a problem we just skip it and keep going with the others but let's just say one of them is really slow we can't skip a slow server so that winds up making the overall time you know significantly longer for all of them because we're basically going to run the speed of whichever connection is the slowest so i think that would be your big limiting factor i think if you're running with all servers on the same lan like a big cluster i'll bet you could hit i'll bet you could do dozens
and it would probably keep working fine yeah i think that one of the most popular we didn't do the diagram today on this but let me just kind of jump out here to this uh the diagram over here if i could find my little video wherever my little video went uh yeah this one right here so this is the video where we talk we show the servers and they're talking communicating the idea here is that you put a server in each of the regions so the people who are local to the server have the best fastest access so this is a diagram and lexi didn't see this yesterday we were showing the the updated version this yesterday so the idea is that the local people that's why we the there's a button in your launcher file for those of you who have that press the button it'll it'll through and we covered this yesterday go through dns and find the closest server based upon latency for you
and uh the idea is that it's going to direct you there if that server is not available it fails whatever then those people are directed to the next closest server but i could see also a more interesting situation here is where you'd put two servers together on a rack and then in one data center or in my office somewhere and and then those two servers do two things one you have if one of them crashes then the other one can carry the load and when you restore the one that crashed the sync will automatically rethread all the missing changes etc right so if you restore from a backup from an hour ago but there's data in there the mirror sync will go oh this is a backup oh it's old by an hour or two hours or whatever it is it's going to thread first thing all the data to bring that database up to date which is huge yes we demoed yesterday we demoed that yesterday
and i did not realize it would do that i mean i guess it would make sense because you want to keep them all synced up but that's really impressive so um the idea is that with i mean that's like enterprise class stuff it really is and so uh that's why i talk about this to you know i mean so for those of you missed this animation yesterday so the idea is that if you have a fail a failure like we'll have down here in the bottom right corner in australia before we just pick on the people in australia it blows up these people don't have a connection anymore if they try to reopen the file or use their launcher again amazon directs them to the next closest server and then they can run on that one for a while then the it people can re resuscitate this one down here and what ends up happening is that uh once it's up and running it gets resynced and then these
people when they quit and reopen will reconnect to the closest server so it's really um important stuff it's really great uh and then uh jesse you are looking uh at any of this or you want to talk about the latency a little bit i mean we'd have a couple questions and mirror sink candles just i figured i'd quickly show like what the ping times look like so yeah let's do that in atlanta um if i ping my closest server is going to be b which is the east coast hopefully that's like 30 years i'm getting 30 milliseconds which is very usable yeah um yeah that that runs great so my next closest server is going to be where you are richard on the west coast that's a and i was getting 90 on this earlier okay so the fastest okay just so everyone understands the fast i ever see from east to west coast is 70. and so this is 85 to 90 right and remember that
the magic number from clarisse officially is 150 or less is their recommendation so but you you'll definitely you know the longer your filemaker is very latency sensitive so if if my latency is three times california to virginia which it is that's going to feel about uh three times slower for everything that i do for every click that i do and every edit that i make it's going to feel like it's taken about three times as long so then let's go to ireland and ireland is basically four times longer um compared to you know virginia and now we go to i think the next closest for me would be sydney which is e now you start getting you know beyond that 150 millisecond threshold and uh and i connected to sydney and to mumbai uh overnight just to test with and it didn't fail it did work but it requires a lot of patience in order to do anything with it and i think the
slowest for me was mumbai which is d yeah and now we're getting 240 230. it's a toss-up that's faster for you from the from from the west coast united states to mumbai it it's hovering at 299 right around two almost 300 so it seems like when we go to mumbai we're going from the from the west coast to the east coast and then right because remember from us to you it's about like if you look at the numbers it was about you know 90. if you had 90 of these numbers that's about what you're getting right um so so it seems like uh our trunk out of the united states goes not from the west coast but from the east coast at least to india it looks today who knows did you want to um you know i was uh i experimented with web direct a little bit before we started our demo go ahead yeah web direct was actually pretty decent uh to my local server
and you can use notice that i'm i'm using the same domain name here as our cluster so this is automatically routing me to the fastest thing which i know is going to be virginia now keep in mind if you get a security error here or a warning when you do this on webdirect it's because we're jumping ssls right from one domain to the next so right we're using 360works. com for our cluster domain because i just set that up on my own amazon account but these servers are really rcc is atrcc is the name so if you get a lock warning about an invalid certificate it's safe to ignore it's just because the names don't match yep so yeah thanks for pointing that out right here i found the speed quite decent uh on on web direct going locally um i don't use webdirect that often and i started using this i was like hey this is really not that bad and so i can come in here and
i can click node and i can give it a subject and uh and commit that and it commits very quickly and everything's good i tried mumbai and uh do it do it do it let's do it do it so i need to put in the actual domain name here because i'm not going to use my cluster address that'll always take me to virginia but right away you can already see it takes quite a bit longer to get logged in i mean remember this is 200 and what 30 milliseconds yeah yeah so going into my contacts that wasn't too bad that was pretty quick it's not bad yeah um well that's what i found the problem is when i started editing records i'm like scrolling here there so if i scroll now i'm releasing and there it shows up what i found is that when i started to edit records like adding notes sometimes it was okay and other times it just hung and i
would eventually have to reload my browser oh really wow yeah yeah that's kind of the rub with web directed so it's you know everyone's like like michael is actually talking it up quite a bit nick likes to talk it up it's it web direct is really great until it's not and there's definitely until it's not part of it you don't really have it till it's not and go and pro but with web direct there's definitely a uh you know there's the uh the glass is half empty and then there's the glass is pretty much totally empty and broke on the ground if you have to if you're in the middle of a solution you have to reload it which means relog in and reboot it that's a failed solution so that's the problem so and that happens enough that makes me nervous that i'm like so yeah the second record i tried to edit i mean so far this has all been going okay for me but
when i went to mumbai the second record i tried to edit i got a little um it's doing some flashy thing right here where it's i'm not doing anything that was just flashing on its own but um i got a little spinner icon right here that just never went away yep uh so you know i mean it it's it's impressive that it that it works and actually i find the speed is especially considered that this is the moon by server uh i find the speed definitely slower than local but not unusably slow it's just that uh when you hit a glitch it can be fatal yeah it's always fatal and that's the problem and so it's uh i whenever it hangs it just hangs and then you're done um and and i don't want to send product that's what i was trying to say the other day and people are like oh richard's full of crap but i don't like to sing customers on a to a website or
a product where there's a 10 my general impression it's other people say it's higher than this but at least a 10 chance of whatever you're doing just gonna hang and uh and so i mean that's why there's pro that's why there's oh and then there's this web direct thing which is kind of this peripheral thing the problem is claire's wants web direct to be the center piece you know the the marquee product the main you know piece forward because they want to be everything on the web except it just is not good enough for that so it kind of somewhere between messaging and execution there's a problem so anyway um it just is it's not it's not an opinion just is right so um and i think someday they want it to be better and that's fine but the pro file you know this database product is pretty damn sophisticated to mimic a copy of pro or go in a browser is an epic effort that's what
niko is it really is it's and the fact that it works at all is amazing because if you have as you remember instant web publishing back from the old days from claris from 4. 0 that was a train wreck and so uh anyway so but yeah i mean it's pretty great for that so anyway um nathan schneider they say that that nick hunter said that paid you to talk nice about web direct so or nathan said dad nick because nick loves it uh that wouldn't be fair clara's wants web direct to attract the android user without saying we are developing for the android platform actually it's that too yeah um no but they actually if you if you look at all their marketing they say cloud first cloud first cloud first cloud first they did that last year devcon they ran around for 24 hours saying cloud first classroom classroom class first oh i have to say filemaker cloud is i've been pretty disappointed with it uh i
have not been able to use it uh the and i mentioned this in passing on the first day but just to make really clear what i was talking about there appears to be some limitation in the filemaker cloud data api where the data api will only work if you are logging in with filemaker client or to the filemaker like my. filemaker site in your browser at least once an hour i don't even understand how they can even say that the product has a data api at this point i mean it does have the data api but how many of your customers that you want to use your data api driven website are also going to first log in with filemaker pro and then once an hour keep logging in with filemaker pro because what happens is when you make those data api calls after an hour it stops working until you log into filemaker pro so obviously it's useless for any sort of public web application
the only people who could use the application are people who use a mixture of filemaker pro logging in regularly and the data api uh and so like with mirrorsync for instance if you wanted to set up mirrorsync to sync with filemaker cloud it works i've actually tested and it does work but you actually have to rdp into your mirrorsync server once an hour and then log in with filemaker pro in order for it to keep working because otherwise they have a blacklist that after an hour stops working yeah so it's it's not even a bug like it's not a bug this is something that somebody engineer actually took after an hour if they haven't logged in with filemaker pro turn it off well we went through the intentional yeah we went through it a little bit with them and what we found out that there was some hooks to some internal and it's more of a technical conversation but my i have a very technical
guy that kind of like operates at the jesse wavelength and uh there was a service i don't know jacob taylor's there but there was a service that they had they had to turn on on their side so we could authenticate properly and without that turned on you just couldn't authenticate properly that's only one part of the puzzle yeah so i got that i ran into the same problem that you're talking about i was able to solve that problem but then there's a barrier that comes after that so even after you get that login part working it'll still only work for an hour and i'm not anti-cloud i mean so we have cloud one and cloud two when jesse today has been talking about cloud he's talking about cloud to the new offering i actually like the simplicity of the setup i think it's fantastic i just think that there's some gaping holes on the back side someone was asking me if it supported sassy and i was
like you know i don't there's so many there's now like six server offerings in market six um and i was like or five five or six i've lost track and so i was trying to remember the sassy is sassy support on cloud 2. um it's it is but there's no plug-ins allowed so so you can do sassy but and so you can do psauce and sassy so is there an interface how do you how do you control the schedule do you with the data yeah no it's uh you can do it with perform script from server on the client but i don't know if there's that uh uh uh don't cheat now jesse barnum that's cheating it's pea sauce is pizza sassy is when you schedule it so so yeah so don't worry i'll i'll keep you straight here in the training department um but yeah i mean so psauce was great that's an important part but if you want to schedule it it's almost going oh
we can't schedule it well there's not an interface for it i guess you could try to use the data or the server the admin api if it allows for that i think there is a way in the admin api but i haven't done it myself we have to get klaus in here klaus makes a solution that does the front end of the servery stuff how much in a couple performance tips that that occurred to me while i was setting this up okay should we go back to your screen now let me go and do that it's it's okay it's just uh it's just talking i'm not i'm not showing anything okay um one is that it will help performance a lot if you want to set this up to put your containers in their own separate table the reason for that is if you've got 100 fields on your in your table and then two container fields anytime that or one or two whatever it doesn't matter any container
fields if you change any one of those fields mirrorsync will write that entire record with all the container data to the other servers whether it's whether it's internal or external container correct yes whether it's internal or external nursing doesn't differentiate which fields have changed it's just going to say hey i know this record changed i need to write the entire contents of this record from here to there and that's not such a big deal if you're talking about text fields but if you've got you know a couple megabytes of photos in with that other data that's also going to get synced so one performance optimization you put your containers into their own separate table and that way all the non-container data will sync but the container data will only sync if you modify the container in its own record right that's that's a that's a tip so if you're thinking about doing this seriously and you want to optimize the performance as much as possible
well that's the enterprise baby it's all about performance um i do want to ask a question here though so because so you're saying that really you're doing record level pushing and reading and stuff like that except when you have a conflict and they need to do this threaded field thing right and that's where you actually look at like which field this and that and then you thread we did that two days ago i think on wednesday yeah and even then we still um we still write all the fields we just look at the individual fields one at a time and compare them we do a three-way merge actually what we do is we we compare them uh server a compared with server b compared with the last time that server a and b were synced um if we just compared server a and b the server a had the value red in it and server b had the value of green in it we don't know whether server a
changed it from green to red or server b changed it from red to green but by comparing them to what was this if they were both green the last time we synced then we know that server b didn't change it to green we know server a changed it to red and that's how we know which server made a change and that's so we do that three-way merge to be able to tell which which field to write over and we do that on a field by field basis but at the end of that process we end up with kind of a unified record that has all the fields merged and then we still write all the contents of that including the containers to each each side so we'll always wind up writing all the container fields and all the fields in the record every time that a record gets modified for conflicts as well as regular non-conflicts okay so it's i if someone's helping with my pronunciation i have
tar e mo tar emo from new zealand that's awesome and then delinsky is asking did you touch on how sync would work with super container question mark could you have a sync with multiple super container servers questions that is an interesting question um so for those that aren't familiar with with our super container product it's basically a web-based cloud kind of files i shouldn't say cloud because most you can install it on the cloud or on-premises so it could be either way but it's basically a web-based file server and you can access it in a web viewer as if it was a container field and then all your container data instead of getting stored with your filemaker database gets stored wherever you happen to be running super container which may or may not even be on the same box as your regular filemaker server um and so typically when people have been doing syncing with super container i've been operating under the assumption that they
have one super container and then one or more filemaker servers or maybe it's like a filemaker server to mobile client either way i've worked on the assumption that the super container just has one instance always available and so you're going to access that same super container server whether you're accessing it from the server or whether you're accessing it from the mobile file or another server they all just share the same url which points the same super container wherever it is because all you're really syncing is that the url field that contains that reference now if you wanted to do what steven is talking about i think it would be possible to sync the super container server itself mirrorsync won't do that for you because mirrorsync is specifically about filemaker and about databases and supercontainer is not a database so mirrorsync doesn't know how to sync supercontainer you could do it using file level synchronization and then you would need to write some calculation fields for
your url so that you know you would know that when you're talking to this server this filemaker server you talk to this super container and when you talk to that filemaker server you talk to that supercontainer and as long as you are then syncing the contents of the super container data volume then that should theoretically work i've never done it and if you want to give it a try i'd love to do a case study on it but uh i think it would work in theory i don't know if it'd be worth the effort though because super container is typically used for storing large files and documents and photos which are not particularly latency sensitive so i think you wouldn't get a very noticeable speed increase by by doing that um okay yeah it sure is you should be curious to think about it yeah yeah so there's a little bit of conversation going over here so that takes care of mr dolinski i hope uh
nathan scheider was talking you know nathan right um they're keeping track they have a running list of all my little sayings so he's a conflict resolution problem child oh okay yeah well nobody's great nathan i really actually i i pick on you but actually we've solved a lot of bugs in our conflict resolution from his his reports that he sent this i actually really do appreciate those reports you sent in all right so i'm gonna read a little bit this from here he's been babbling away so he says how about jesse talk about some of the common customizations that user do within the script give people idea ideas on neat things that users are doing so for example i use the user token to filter records user token is a special variable that gets passed the server um and then another then he says another one here i'll let you kind of sort these jesse another thing was just i can't read them so if anything you want
to mention i'll i'm just okay i just gave you the one about the user token and then he mentions another item you can decide which of these are more valuable or do both another thing we discussed before with jesse this week was the idea of separating your graphics into separate related tables we just kind of covered that um a major way to increase your speed once again separating the graphics and having improved performance i want to be really careful there's some more junior basic people here this is a this is a mirror sync conversation and enterprise conversation if you're using one filemaker server and not using mirrorsync which is 99 of the people out there at the moment although any second that's going to change because enterprise is going to take over filemaker right so but that being said containers are not normally brought down when you download records unless they're on the layout there's certain like when you like if you're going to display like
i'm over here i'm on my screen for a second and let's say i'm gonna go i'm gonna i'm not i'm on the home let's just pretend i just logged on i've never been in here before i'm on the home screen right here and i go to contacts it's gonna load this miles debsky's entire record here and if this container wasn't here this unicorn shooting rainbows um then the container would be skipped so when you load a record it loads all the fields of the record all all right now it won't trigger summaries or unstory calculations unless they are needed on screen it won't download a container unless it's on the layout somehow make sense so the idea of separating the containers out not necessary that's a very specific nursing trick yeah it's a mirror sync trick so understand that so when people say oh separate it out it's much more efficient not really it depends if you're using mirror sync and then it's useful like if
we were going to use this product and we had a lot of images going on i would probably take this image in and move it out and there's also a little digital document management thing we can put contracts and stuff in here we would take those items and put them in their own table away so that would help the sinkiness go faster right so let me come back to nathan's point about the user token because that is a really good yeah okay then i'm going to switch back to your screen so you can demo the user tokeny part right yeah and i don't uh so let's let me pull up uh all right we're back to you now okay so in this um so the area that nathan's talking about is this customization section which i think we've talked on talked about before but this is kind of a new tip that i didn't show before so there's here's the customization section and you can customize any of these options
uh this is a preferences thing will sync is something that will run before the sync starts so if you want to do some kind of overall thing like maybe you want to write a log record someone that says syncing is starting at such and such time uh you can do that or you could say things like uh sync from user such and such starting now find changes is the big one that most people customize and i'm going to come back to that show message allows you to control all the dialogues that mirrorsync pops up so um let me just jump down for a second and i'll show you what they look like here's the show message set stop pops up where pops up where uh on a mobile device this is this is this has much more to do with the client sync than a server servicing got it okay my brain was thinking the enterprise yeah you're right it doesn't make sense in a server environment okay
um but for clients these are all the canned dialogues that mirror sync will show at various points during the process and like error messages sync complete on that kind of stuff so all of these can be customized you can come in here and if you don't like our wording like this is your first sync from this device if you want to say this is your first sync from this ipad you can just change it um and uh and so this is all customizable we've had people for instance customize this into other languages for their users uh so if they have some spanish users they might come in here and they would have an if statement you know if language is spanish then do this else you know do that um everyone knows how to do fl so i don't need to demo that i don't think um another example of where people will customize the show message is sometimes they may not even want to prompt the
user they just want so instead of asking them if they want to sync on their first device you can just comment this out and then you could set this last message choice to one as if they had clicked ok and so you can suppress dialogues that way you can customize the dialogues you can put them in a different language you can potentially log certain things that are happening you can run whatever you want to do in your script so that's the show message thing uh did insert did update will delete those are all fairly straightforward um you know did insert means a record just got added do you want to do anything you want to set some do you want to maybe clear some things out of it or set some summaries or set some totals or just keep track of it in a log or something did update is the exact same thing except we didn't add a new record we modified an existing record and will
delete is something that we call when we have the record in our found set that we are about to delete and then your script could take some action for instance you might say omit this record and then there's nothing for us to delete if you don't want that record to be deleted or you could uh you know create a global variable that says record such and such was deleted at such and such time by nursing so you can control that and then didsync is the opposite of willsync will sync happens right once before the script runs and did sync happens once after the script runs so you can change all these things to control how this works but the one i want to get to where nathan was asking a good question is the find changes section if so and i think i showed this before you could if you use get account name you'll get the name again this is really more applicable to for client to
server syncs if they're on a mobile device so let's not think about server to service things here if your client is running a sync uh you'll have their username their their filemaker logged in account name and you can use that to search by records and you can search on related records too so you know if there's a project table and their name is the assigned to then you can filter all only projects that are assigned to them but if there's a project to do table you don't need to have their username as a field in that project to do table you would just relate back to the project table and you would say you know enter find mode and set the related project username to the current username and that would automatically also filter all of your related project to do items but let's say you want to have some arbitrary thing that's not their username maybe you want to just sync a specific project that they pick
when they sync or maybe you want to sync a certain number of days but you allow the user to pick if they want one day 7 days 30 days or 90 days so you can't really tell that from the account name so we give you one additional thing that you can set which is double dollar sign mirror sync user token and that will be set to whatever it is on the mobile device so if you're opening script uh on your mobile device sets mirrorsync username to 30 then we could say you know set field um and i don't i'm just making stuff up here but char product total equal to greater than your sync user token and now it's only going to find records where the chart product total is greater than 30. um and so that's what the mercent user token is for is a way for you to pass in anything that you want you could even use json data to pass in
like five different things so so yeah anything that you pass in there will be available to your customization script and some examples of things that people have used that for is a user selecting a project from a list and so they've got a list of projects they pick a thing and then mirrorsync will sync another table but it'll set the user token to the id of whichever project it picked so that it will only get the records for that particular project which is going to be very efficient um and so that uh that's an example of the kind of stuff you do with the user token okay yeah i do have a question here dolinsky's back a um it's a kind of interest not a term i use too much here but uh he says the mirrorsync worker script uses a few executed sql i'm assuming commands has anyone experienced the file bloat bug reported on the community using fql which i think is filemaker
query language and the table contains a uh and table contains a container question mark so um so let me uh so we don't do sql for containers um it's you can see how it works if you want to pick apart that worker script but basically the worker script it does okay that's not exactly true we do do containers but we only we use the uh is it the get as function i think it's either cast or get as i forget i just pasted the uh his comment to you in slack if you want to like look at that real quick that way you can actually read it because i don't i don't want to like misinterpret what he said so i'm not familiar with that particular uh thread about the bloat and the container issue but i um but i will point out that when we do an execute sql the only thing we're getting from the container is its name um and
we send that up with all of the non-container data and then if mirrorsync says okay now give me that container value then we're going to that record doing a find and doing an insert from url with the contents of that container as a http put operation so i'm not sure if that addresses the bug or not stephen if you want to email me i know you've got my address if you want to email me a link to that thread i'll take a look at it and see if there looks like there's anything on there that would pertain to mirrorsync uh the question uh ken tully was asking some questions about uh implementation etc like that he uh yeah yeah ken's got an interesting spot where he needs to do a little bit of container action using data api and it's it's uh it's not a necessarily inexpensive piece thing to do he's had some questions so if someone has questions about whether they should use
your product or not i mean okay so jesse let me ready here comes a really big softball on three ready i'm gonna wind up if someone has questions about how you can help them with 360 works products what should they do can they reach out to you yes they definitely can send an email to support 360works. com we've got i think like seven people that monitor that uh and so you should get a fairly quick answer to that yeah we have a that's where we uh are we let the our filemaker coaches cut their teeth and they uh they coach and then they also do tech support at the same time and they learn all the ins and outs and stuff so and then i uh and then for those of you wonder i think jesse does the same thing i was going to comment on this um i spend a good chunk of time doing tech support myself because i think it's valuable when the the manager
slash ceos bosses of the world uh actually interact with the end customers and understand the questions they're asking so um so that i know jesse does that he's uh obviously directly at least half of my time is mirror think support yeah i spent a lot of my time in training and so i probably answer a quarter questions that come in i would say about um i think that's really useful so you can see what the tempo and the pacing and what kind of what what what bothers people that's why i could do the training because i already know what the questions are right um if i didn't know what the questions are i'd be really scared to come up here in front of you going hi um and i'm in and i'm so-and-so from someone so company and i'm going to talk about tech support and people are like hey how come the fql bug in the container doesn't bloat the file and explode it and
stephen dulinski shows up and this lights the guy on fire right and he's like uh i'm gonna let my technical helper here take over and he just walks off and has a coffee right so um yeah we eat our own dog food because we eat our own dog food and we talk to customers we're able to have that conversation nathan's like uh uh there's also oh here here's another softball you ready jesse here comes the softball ready one two three because there's there's also good resources for mirror sync on their forum which is hosted by stephen dalinski yes so stephen delandski right here mirrors before yeah pretty awesome i wanted to make sure everyone had the url for mirrorsync you can go to mirrorsync. com it redirects you to the permanent url which is 360works. com filemaker dash sync and uh we everything that i've been showing you guys uh and i mentioned it before but i want to mention it one more time you can
do everything that i've been showing you for free on one device in a client to server environment so um i think it would be a you know a really educational interesting exercise to download a copy of mirrorsync install it on your filemaker server run through the configuration with whatever solution you happen to be working on right now and see how it works for a client to server sync and if it works well for a client to server sync it's going to be the exact same setup process for server to servicing the screens are all the same so try that out that's completely free if you decide that you would like to do a server to server sync send an email to support360works. com and just say hey this is uh this is steven i'd like to do a 30-day trial could you send that to me i'll forward that to warren who's our licensing manager and warren will get you that 30-day trial license key for the
server server lexi has a story just a short and we are wrapping up here folks lexi folger says 360 work works once fixed a bug for me which i had falsely blamed on them how awesome is that right so probably when she was at clarus or filemaker at the time said yeah 360 work socks there's this bug then they went and fixed her fixed it well there don't there are numerous numerous numerous cases where it is our fault so we got lucky on that one but uh you know the thing is it's you know you can't ship bug-free software but what you need to do is you need to react quickly when there's issues so that's that's always our goal is to fix those issues as quickly as possible this clapping for you don't just ignore the clapping thank you so i tell people i'll remind you of that richard next time you come next time you're puking down my throat uh i only i only
i only visit you when my team is feeling like they're not feeling the love and so i just kind of let go jess and i go hey jesse you in there hey we got to fix it [Laughter] all right cool uh but yeah no he's good with that that's fine um all right well any other questions folks we're gonna let this run for a little bit then later this afternoon we're gonna uh probably shut these servers down or they will be your access to them will be limited we're probably gonna leave them run in a limited capacity for demos um to show people who who show that the enterprise is possible that reminds me there was one guy that emailed me and i think he's probably on this call okay uh i hope i get his name right i think it's emilio uh and he told me that he's been listening to this and he uses mirrorsync with client-to-server uh sinking for a huge uh was i don't
remember if it was a cattle or a sheep ranch in bolivia and he said they're like 500 miles away from decent working internet i assume that's an exaggeration but maybe it's not um and uh so he built the filemaker solution for them and then they used to only use it when they would come to the office but i guess when nursing came out they started putting a distributed copy on on i guess i'll i'm just using my imagination now but i guess there's a bunch of people like on horseback or motorcycle or scooter or atv or whatever that go out and take care of these sheep and cattle and then they enter all their stuff into mirrorsync and sync it up when they get back so i thought that was a really cool story and emilia i looked at your website and i saw the pictures of your sheep and it was really cool man all right that's fine only sound effects here are only the best
sound effects for our people we've already had three explosions this morning so i'm feeling pretty here this afternoon is pretty happy about that so all right well uh any other final questions uh but yeah it's pretty awesome and then once again i want to go and point out so this is your special amazing discount deal those who want 15 off especially if it's like you know 1600 bucks 15 it's like you know enough for a good trip to a restaurant somewhere anyway but uh yeah um save some money on it or not or just uh come up and decide yeah i'm gonna write my own sync software i don't need to spend 1600 bucks on it i didn't mean to laugh oh sorry no i'm laughing i think it's funny like i said oh and then kim julie is claire reese missing from the sheep of amelia okay i don't yeah oh clarice yes sorry my bad this is clarisse my licensing expert clarice thank you guys all for
being this has been a ton of time and i'm sure your blood pressure's a day over five days it's really fun for me i love to present this stuff the more questions i get the more fun it is and i had there were a lot of really good questions that really made it enjoyable to me uh and so i just want to say thank you to everybody who has taken the time to sit in on this and especially the people who ask questions during the presentation thank you very much cool everyone we'll catch you monday next week for some more awesomeness appreciate seeing alexis some of the folks out there we'll catch you next time bye guys bye and the guys just stepped up the whole way calm cool collected the quarterback great read good patience more importantly great job up front protecting this quarterback to give you a chance and that's all you can ask for trying to rally down 10. 9 25 to go here in the fourth short motion by amendola from the left brady takes the shotgun step stands and throws it left ramadan reaches up and snags a high throw and lands inside the tent with an eye slightly behind him again he makes the ground
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