SeedCode is closed for our holiday break from December 19th through the end of the year. We’ll have folks available in case of emergencies and will reply to non-emergency emails with a short note before we resume work when we’re back in January.
The team here wishes all our customers a restful holiday and every success in the New Year!
We’ve been sending lots of calendar invitations from FileMaker as part of our DayBack deployments. The best workflow we’ve found invites the recipient to an event rather than creating the event right on the recipient’s calendar.
This approach offers many advantages, including polling for the recipient’s response to see if they have accepted the invitation (screenshot below).
Jason Young packaged this into an unlocked demo file and presented it at the most recent PauseOnError gathering in Georgia. The file includes a README and a short movie to help you set this up. This uses FileMaker’s native Insert from URL command and built-in JSON parsing, so it doesn’t require any plugins. (This is a companion to Jason’s Send Email from FileMaker using GMail example that’s been very helpful to folks.)
In addition to seeing the recipient’s response to the invitation, invitations have many advantages over writing to the recipients’ calendars directly.
When you’re testing this, note that Google won’t send invitations in the past and won’t send them to the organizer/creator, but it will get put on the organizer’s calendar.
We share these examples hoping people will dig into them and get their hands dirty. We’re happy to answer questions but can’t dig into your scripts without charging for our work. If you’d like hands-on help or would like us to wire up calendar invitations in your solution, please get in touch, and we can do this as part of an implementation package.
(Big thanks to DB Services for their examples authenticating into Google from FileMaker!)
Part two of our recap of the newest extensions to DayBack Calendar for FileMaker. These are published on the DayBack blog and in our new Extensions Library. Most come with example code you can paste into your instance of DayBack.
(Here’s part 1 if you missed it.)
Visualize the percent complete with progress bars on each task, adding warnings when they exceed estimates in DayBack’s Gantt Chart.
Add custom workflows in your calendar by embedding forms, charts, and progress bars in each event. You can certainly do this using your own FileMaker layouts instead of DayBack’s popover, but if you want this in the popover, example code is included and implementation help is available. You can also add displays like this to DayBack’s tooltips.
We’re adding more ways for you to reschedule multiple events simultaneously. This action lets you drag-select events and switch their statuses and resources all at the same time. If your events have multiple resources, this action makes it easy to swap out some of those resources for a new one, leaving the remaining resources untouched.
In addition to making entire calendars read-only in DayBack, you can now designate individual fields as read-only or hidden. Read-only fields are helpful when you’re rendering calc fields in the calendar and don’t want DayBack to try and edit them when you drag or duplicate events. Hidden fields are useful when you need a field in a tooltip or custom action but don’t need the field taking up space on screen.
That’s it for now. Keep up with all the updates to DayBack on Twitter or on our blog.
We’ve been publishing a lot of new extensions to DayBack, many with example code to get you started. You’ll find these on the DayBack blog and in the new Extensions Library.
Here’s a recap of some of the coolest examples…
Printing calendars has always been tricky as some of the information you want to see is often off-screen. While printing in a regular FileMaker sub-summary report is often the best approach, sometimes you want to SEE the calendar grid or timeline. This custom action gets you closer to printing everything on one screen.
People love DayBack because they can bring colors and icons into their calendar letting them understand their schedule at a glance. We’ve published a number of examples for doing this, and this one adds a border down the left side of your event. This color can represent any field in your FileMaker table.
Sometimes you want to create events in your calendar from other applications. In this example, we wanted to schedule follow-up calls from inside our help desk software. DayBack can receive requests like this as URL parameters and render custom forms to make scheduling faster. Here’s an example of a form we built to schedule reminders. Part 1 of this post shows a simpler version; part 2 shows what we’re doing now.
Sometimes you have a list of items that you need to schedule instead of just one. Maybe it’s a list of project milestones or last month’s sales you want to follow up on. In this video, we demonstrate a way to copy and paste events from a list into your calendar. This has been a very popular workflow for folks with complex scheduling requirements.
Here is part 2 with more examples.
We have two new open positions; one for an advanced FileMaker developer for custom projects, and one for a customer support role with JavaScript experience. Details, salary range, benefits, and an outline of the hiring process can all be found here: Working with Us.
DayBack for FileMaker allows you to drag-select multiple events on the calendar and drag to reschedule them all at once. But what if you’d like to do something besides changing their date or time? You may want to delete them all at once or change their status.
Now you can add buttons to the calendar that will operate against the selected group of events. In this example, we’ve added buttons to DayBack’s “button launcher” to change the status of selected events.
Find example code and instructions for adding this to your DayBack here: Edit Multiple Events at Once.
We’ve collected nearly 100 of the most popular calendar customizations into a searchable library, making it easier than ever to change the way your calendar behaves.
Many of these mods are things you can paste right into your DayBack. Others you’ll want to download and modify. And a few will require our help to deploy. But most have example code and videos so that you can build the workflows and automation you’ve always wanted in your schedule.
Building realistic schedules gives customers confidence that you’ll keep your promises. Now DayBack gives your dispatchers the confidence to make those promises by visualizing drive times and distances in your schedule.
In this example, the DayBack compares a day’s mileage across a field service team:
SeedCode offers ProMaps as a stand-alone mapping template for FileMaker. ProMaps supports routes and filtering. But adding mapping inside DayBack can mean better scheduling decisions, not just better routing decisions for a schedule that’s not ideal.
Drive time and mapping integrations in DayBack are customizations deployed as part of our implementation packages. We can create time and distance calculators to match your specific workflows and include warnings when your schedule exceeds your constraints.
Learn more here: Displaying Distance & Drive Times
Mapping and distance math are a big part of our calendar customizations. DayBack can warn schedulers if there is insufficient drive-time between appointments or if another asset is closer to the customer that week. And our ProMaps app lets developer add mapping into their own projects.
Occasionally we take this mapping expertise in entirely new directions. In this case study, engineering firm Marx|Okubo wanted to email damage assessment maps to property owners within minutes of a quake in their area. Ann Kiser, SeedCode’s director of custom projects, designed an excellent solution that listens to the USGS feed, finds potentially affected properties, calculates likely damage, and emails graphics and reports automatically.
SeedCode’s Ann Kiser with Alan Corkhill, director of technology for Marx|Okubo
This solution is now a vital component of the ASAP product (Automated Structure Alert Program) Marx|Okubo is marketing in seismically active areas. It’s one thing to build software for someone; it’s another for them to take our work into a product: we couldn’t be more proud.
Damage intensity radiating from a quake
Plotting affected properties and their potential damage
Big thanks to Ann, Jason, and KC at SeedCode, who worked on this, and Alan Corkhill, director of technology for Marx|Okubo, for all the engineering know-how and inspiration. And thanks to the marketing team at Claris for filming a great customer success story.
For the last few years, I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to work as the primary developer on the custom FileMaker app for Blueprint Capital REIT, a real estate lending and development firm based in Seattle, WA. Although their app uses and integrates with a variety of tools and services, my head is usually living exclusively in FileMaker-land, extending the data model, building new layouts, and scripting workflows. So when the opportunity comes to integrate with something new outside of FileMaker, I get excited. And maybe a little nervous. And much more so (both excitement and nerves) for the prospect of adding some Artificial Intelligence to their app!
I, like many software developers, can often hold a (healthy?) skepticism of AI.
Toyota adds more operators to its “driverless” vehicle after it crashes into visually impaired athlete at Paralympic Games. https://t.co/nVFpWMIDbm
— hypervisible dot pdf (@hypervisible) August 31, 2021
How Tesla’s autopilot system interprets traffic lights on the back of a moving truck. I guess this scenario was probably not part of the system’s training data. A good illustration of how it will likely be impossible to reach full driving autonomy just by recording “more data”. https://t.co/eZEhxhpXBC
— Max Little (@MaxALittle) June 3, 2021
I used GPT-3 to generate new Disney villains.
I, too, rebel against the mandatory sasquatch dress code.https://t.co/n6nvZn50Jz pic.twitter.com/WDh73g3fv6
— Janelle Shane (@JanelleCShane) April 30, 2021
But as Blueprint’s accounting team took on more customers, they faced some challenges that improving the data-entry workflow alone couldn’t resolve. They estimated it cost $8 to process a single invoice; multiply that by an average of 1,200 (and growing) per month, and invoice processing quickly becomes an expensive task. Perhaps even more costly were the long hours and late nights the team put in each month. To make a significant impact, we would need to automate more of the process with the help of AI. Read Full Article →
