Thank you, oh thank you! To be quite honest, this is something that has struck me for quite some time and I’m gladly not nuts and another (obviously, VERY smart) FileMaker developer named Mikhail Edoshin has blogged about it.
Nearly as long as FileMaker developers have been adamant on establishing and using naming conventions, I’ve been equally as adamant on NOT using them. That is, I absolutely hate naming a field something like “kz_calcMyTotalLinkSum”. I understand why developers would want to do such things, but I increasingly find that given the fact that developers can offer only limited protection from errors and can only respond to those errors within a set of constraints (read: bland error dialogs or field validation warnings), when the user becomes aware of some of the internal workings of a solution, that the developer intended to keep hidden, clarity and communication breakdown quickly.
Because of the possibility of unforeseen errors, I keep my field names simple and clear e.g. “Sum”, “Daily Total”, etc. This works most especially given that I can let users have greater control over sorting and exporting on certain layouts because the fields they see are clearly described and easily understood. (This is a more recent development because of FileMaker 8’s control of only displaying fields on a layout rather than ALL the fields in the table). Mikhail articulates my frustration far better and I encourage you to go read his post, perhaps you’ll see the light!
One Comment
It’s interesting that FileMaker recently published quite an opposite techbrief that recommends using names like _kmgt__SelectedDaysView