From Dwayne Wright - Certified FileMaker 10 Developer
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dwaynewright APPENDIX 6: Around The Net
I've had a subscription to the ISO FileMaker Magazine for quite some time but I rarely take the time to really explore the excellent movies produced from the site. I'm going to try and make a concerted effort to rectify this and thought I'd make some brief notes for myself along the way. Today I was looking at the latest release called User Friendly Finds. This tutorial movie clocks in at 27 minutes and some change.
Within the first 90 seconds of the tutorial, Matt hid the status area and then had a unique search area automatically come up after hitting the keyboard shortcut for Find mode of command F ( for Macintosh users) or control F ( for Windows users). At least this is what I thought, on closer examination, the user is still in browse mode. Then to make the magic a bit more special, he hit the escape key on the keyboard to have the find specific window go away. Very cool indeed and is more user friendly for the casual FileMaker database user but not sure I would say the same for the experienced user.
One tidbit of the overall secret sauce is shown only 4 minutes into the presentation. I won't revel that here because this movie is part of a subscriber package.
Overall, I found the technique very interesting but won’t rush out to implement it in my current solutions. I will however, log it for something to review if a situation comes up that makes it a viable choice.
The main thing that is missing is dealing with extended and constrained finds. I’m a big fan of this as a data gathering technique and don’t won’t to regulate my users to techniques that do not support these viable search options. Another problem for me was that searches that don’t find any results, the scripted routine defaults back to a found set of all records in the table. I’d like to default back to the current found set at the state in which the search was executed. I guess this can be accomplished via the old hidden window before the search routine.
Missing juicy bits (such as constrained finds) like this are why I rarely embrace techniques that try to replace core FileMaker functionality in searches, security or navigation. Overall though, this movie displays some very powerful stuff and I recommend it highly. Many times, you learn more by taking the journey learning the technique than the final destination of the technique.
If you are interested in more quality FileMaker information like this searching option, check out FileMaker Magazine at
http://www.filemakermagazine.com/ and subscribe today.
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More info about the author and FileMaker in general, contact me at info@dwaynewright.com.
© 2009 - Dwayne Wright - dwaynewright.com
The material on this document is offered AS IS. There is NO REPRESENTATION OR WARRANTY, expressed or implied, nor does any other contributor to this document. WARRANTIES OF MERCHANT ABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE EXPRESSLY DISCLAIMED. Consequential and incidental damages are expressly excluded. FileMaker Pro is the registered trademark of FileMaker Inc.
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FileMaker 10 saved find information is stored with the users security account. This means the user can access their saved find information when logged into the database from a different machine but using the same security account. 
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