“Claris FileMaker 19.6 continues to deliver significant improvements in performance, security, and reliability, including support for the latest Apple operating systems — macOS Venture, iOS 16, and iPadOS 16. Plus, get even more new tools you can trust to help solve the hard problems that matter to your important business operations.

Claris

Get your hands on the newest release – Claris FileMaker 19.6.1 – and start making use of a number of highly anticipated new features and tools that will help you be even more productive and efficient. These enhancements make the FileMaker platform the best rapid application development environment to build customized, integrated apps even faster and more efficiently than any other platform on the market. 

• Better control through automation
• Time-saving administration tools
• Stronger security and authentication
• More features and OS updates

Transactions

For those unfamiliar with database transactions, they can be simply described as a set of operations that are treated as a single unit (“all or nothing”). This means that either all of the operations within the transaction succeed, or none of them do. Transactions provide data integrity and atomicity by ensuring that data is either all committed or all rolled back in case of an error.

Transactions have been a part of the Claris FileMaker model for some time, but controlling transactions in FileMaker has always been somewhat of a hurdle. Prior to version 19.6, FileMaker Pro transactions required a specific context and schema so that once the parent record was opened and locked, all related records could then be touched.

If an error occurred at any point during the transaction, the parent record could be reverted and all related changes would revert. If a commit occurred at any point during the transaction, all subsequent record changes would be committed.

Under 19.6.1, FileMaker developers now have much more control over the transaction, with specific “Open”, “Commit”, and “Revert” script steps. While the transaction still needs to occur within a window, the layout context can now change while a transaction is open, which removes the schema requirements and the need to manage the committed state of a record. Much simpler!

There’s also a new function Get(TransactionOpenState) which checks if a transaction is open or not.

Check out this post in the Claris Engineering Blog for even more details. 

Error Capture

Error handling is one of the key components to any transaction. The function Get(LastErrorDetail) (which was “LastExternalErrorDetail”) has been adjusted so it “… returns the text of transaction error information, including script name, step name, and line number when it is evaluated after a Commit Transaction script step”. 

One thing to keep in mind when using transactions, “… aggregate functions like List and Count don’t have access to records modified within the transaction and only provide information for records that are not part of the transaction.”

So, any records open during the transaction don’t get appropriately aggregated while the records are open. This is a current known issue and will hopefully be addressed in the near future.

Sign in with Apple ID

In addition to Amazon, Google and Microsoft single sign on functionality, accounts in a FileMaker file can now use an Apple ID to log in to the file.

Functions

Get(CurrentTimeUTCMicroseconds)

We’ve had Get(CurrentTimeUTCMilliseconds) for quite some time, but now we have Get(CurrentTimeUTCMicroseconds), which really narrows down that millisecond window. This is especially helpful when tracking exact duration.

Get(LastErrorLocation)

Another handy new function is the Get(LastErrorLocation), which returns the location of the last error in a script. The result is a carriage-returned list with these values:

Script Name
Script Step
Script Line Number

Updated Libraries

FileMaker’s charting objects are powered by the ChartDirector library, which has been updated to version 7.0. According to the ASE, version 7.0 has a number of new charts, features, and performance improvements. The libraries for jsonCPP (to 3.0.7) and OpenSSL (to 1.9.5) have also been updated, but we didn’t notice any significant changes in our quick-use of those functions.

General changes

Disable context menu

When a container field is optimized for interactive content on a layout, the context menus for playback and sound can now be completely disabled.

Delete cached temp files

A user can now delete the cached temp files from the Preferences, under the Application settings. This could be helpful when troubleshooting a lagging solution, especially when web viewers are being used to load images and video. FileMaker stores that web viewer content in the temporary cache, which can fill the cache and in turn, slow down the system’s performance.

Create Add-on

FileMaker Add-ons have been a game-changer for many solutions since their introduction in 19.1, with developers creating all sorts of modular add-ons to be added to any solution in just minutes. Prior to 19.6, add-ons could only be created via script-step, but can now be created via the Tools > Create Add-on command. There are specific steps to follow when using this new functionality:

1. In Layout Mode, name the layout “__FMAddOnTemplateDirectives_en”.
2. Select multiple objects on the layout.
3. Choose Arrange menu > Group.
4. With the group selected, choose Tools menu > Create Add-on.

According to the documentation, this feature is not quite complete, so keep that in mind if you choose to use it.

Bug Fixes

There are a number of bug fixes addressed in this release, but here are a few that we have experienced and are excited to see addressed.

Last-layout bug

In Windows, when you go into layout mode, then navigate to a layout that’s pretty far down the list, it would skip all the way to the last layout in the solution. The only way to get to the necessary layout was to build a button to go to that layout by name, or use the keyboard (Control+Up/Down).

According to the documentation, this was caused by a layout ID limit of 255, which has been increased to 1020.

Cmd-Z bug

Personally, I’ve been bitten by the “Cmd-Z bug” a few times, which caused me to lose some scripting. Enough to bring back my habit of hitting Cmd-S each time I finish a section of script. I’m very happy to see this bug addressed.

Known issues

In MacOS Ventura (13.1), I’ve noticed a bit of a lag when opening and closing the Script Workspace. The release notes have confirmed this is a known issue, which is good to know.

Conclusion

The Claris FileMaker Pro 19.6.1 update brings a number of new features and some exciting updates to the platform. We’re glad to see Claris investing resources into this product, thanks in part to an active online community of developers. If the platform continues to evolve as fast as they’re planning, we look forward to more updates come down the pipeline in the near future.

This post highlights just a few of the updates that we’re excited about. For the full release notes, head over to the Claris FileMaker documentation.

If you’d like some assistance upgrading, or implementing some aspects of FileMaker 19.6, give us a shout.