Countless FileMaker have no doubt, encountered the daunting problem of Reporting. How do we produce polished, professional, powerful, and easy to write reports in a FileMaker system?
There have been a number of interesting articles on this topic in FileMaker Advisor and it is certainly a point of concern with developers and users. The point of contention has been, until FileMaker version 7 and 8, that in order to create sophisiticated reports with multiple variables and options and queries, some form of scripting was involved (it is still necessary). Versions 7+ brought about the ability to define a privilege set whereby developers could let users have access to create new scripts, or run new scripts with full access privileges, but they would not simultaneously be granted unlimited access to all of a solution’s inner workings e.g. Define Fields, creation of new layouts etc.
This improvement should not be glanced over lightly, it is an ENORMOUS improvement in the ability to build, package, and deploy professional quality solutions to your users.
But I want and expect more…
4D has some VERY nice reporting and graphing capabilities built in to the basic Client application, one that allows users to SAVE previous reports on their local computer AND to do graphs of all sorts (pie charts, bar charts, etc) all from within the solution. In addition, these are part of the core database system and are not expensive add ons or hacks and workarounds of one kind or another. In other words, you do not need to overlap two fields filled with proportionate #s of |||||||||||||||||||||||||| to create a status bar (if you don’t know what I mean, check out databasepros.com and look for the status bar sample file in the resources section).
But even so, 4D’s features aren’t good enough for what I’m looking towards. I want Flex for FileMaker. That’s pretty much the best way to put it. Flex is Adobe (formerly Macromedia’s) budding marriage of Flash and ColdFusion that can be used to design data reports and dashboards. In their own vernacular:
Consolidate data from disparate systems, provide charting, graphing, and drill down—all without page refreshes. Executive reporting systems can now deliver on the true promise of real-time dashboards.
If you break down the screenshot, it’s simple and intuitive enough. Four separate yet related graphs that update by themselves (automatically) and can be saved as a canned report or graph for later reference (the list of chart sets on the left). The enterprise stylings and focus of the Flex product is obvious. With FileMaker making a bigger and better small business and enterprise push, this is what we need!
Some more reading material:
http://www.macromedia.com/software/flex/
http://macromedia.com/devnet/flex/
3 Comments
I have to agree with you wholeheartedly on this one. The company i work at develops in Flex, and we get a lot of clients come in asking to hook up [add your favorite database here] to Flex, to take advantage of all of the animated charts, cool interface, etc… By the way, a client is talking with us right now about using Filemaker with Flex 2.0. And you’re absolutely right about the pushing data to a dashboard – we’ve seen people decide on Flex right after seeing a demo of this.
-Casey
I’ve become increasingly more fond of dashboards as they simplify the essence of what most of my clients ask for in terms of reporting for their solutions. Google Analytics is a flash-based dashboard solution for all intents and purposes (not Flex-based, but certainly Flash-based).
Flex sold me based on the potential of the technology and not even the demo (though the demo did have me salivating).
If you have any interesting Flex sites to visit, please post here. Thanks for your comment!
In response to Emile’s request, here’s a site that provides a Flex-FileMaker bridge. From the site: “FlexFM is a newly created library that offers developers greater control and flexibility in using FileMaker® Server as a data back-end for Adobe® Flex-based applications.”
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