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Appointment Booking in FileMaker WebDirect using DayBack Calendar

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Here’s a great implementation of DayBack Online with a FileMaker WebDirect solution by Jason Trenary at the South Carolina School of Music.

Jason built an online portal for students to reserve recording equipment using the DayBack Online calendar interface. Students are able to see exactly when the equipment they’ve selected is already booked, and when there are openings they can select to reserve the equipment for themselves.

Here’s a video showing it in action: https://vimeo.com/314928217

The equipment selection process is all done in FileMaker WebDirect layouts. Then the calendar is loaded, passing the selected equipment and a unique session id as url parameters to DayBack Online. Using Custom Event Actions, the student is notified when they try to reserve equipment that is already reserved. And when they save a valid appointment, the calendar is automatically closed and the page returns to the related FileMaker reservation record with the updated schedule information.

Big thanks to Jason Trenary at the South Carolina School of Music for sharing his work with us!

If you’d like help utilizing DayBack Online to create a custom appointment booking solution like this, please get in touch.

Zoom Meetings for FileMaker – Schedule Meetings with DayBack Calendar

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At SeedCode, we schedule most of our screen-shares with Zoom, so as part of streamlining our workflow we wanted to schedule these Zoom meetings directly from our calendar. Button actions in DayBack Calendar let you add your own buttons to events in the calendar. These buttons extend the calendar’s capabilities they’re great for connecting your calendar with third-party applications like Zoom.

Overview

FileMaker and ZeitWe created a middleware service that runs the majority of the logic and sends requests to the Zoom API. Using middleware keeps the custom actions in DayBack much more straightforward than they’d be if all the required JavaScript were in these button actions. While this service could be run on just about any server, we decided that this would be an excellent opportunity to take advantage of Zeit. Zeit lets you spin up small instances of server-side code, similar to containers, without having to deploy and configure an entire server to run it on. Working with Zeit has been a great experience and is looking like it could be a pattern for future FileMaker API integrations.

I write a bit more about the technical side of this middleware (called DayBack Meetings Service) and Zeit further down in this post. You’ll also find downloads and a FileMaker example file that contains all the code you’ll need to add this to your own copy of DayBack Calendar.

Schedule Zoom Meetings from FileMaker

We’ve created buttons to schedule, start, and delete meetings. These actions also listen to DayBack events and reschedule Zoom meetings when you drag a meeting to a new time; they’ll also warn you if your new meeting time conflicts with another Zoom meeting.

Here’s a video of it in action: https://vimeo.com/314570405

 

Read Full Article →

Preview – New Sidebar Header for DayBack

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We’re about to launch a new in-app update to DayBack that will include a new look for the sidebar header. This new version is much easier to modify with CSS for folks who want to remove tabs, rename tabs, or switch between icons and text for the tab labels. We also think it makes it more obvious that users can close and open the sidebar.

If you’re already using DayBack and don’t like the new look, you’ll find notes and CSS below that will let you revert to the old style. This preview and the instructions below are for you.

Here’s what the new header will look like. The current version is on the left, and the new version is on the right:

Getting the New Sidebar Look

The new sidebar will be available as an in-app update in the next day or so.

Read Full Article →

Schedule Balancing with Calendar Analytics

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For most teams, there’s a fine line between not having enough work and having way too much. DayBack Calendar helps us see the difference. Here’s a behind the scenes look at how SeedCode balances developers’ schedules using DayBack’s calendar analytics.

What’s working here

A couple of key ingredients need to be in place before this kind of scheduling works.

Blocking off time to work. That orange dotted line representing our goal only works if our developer has actually blocked out 5 hours a day to work on this stuff. And that means she’s blocked off other time for correspondence and meetings, and that she’s defending the time she’s blocked off to code. Blocking off uninterrupted time to work is critical.

Getting realistic about capacity. Some shops really overestimate how much you can get done in a day: I think 5 productive hours of coding is almost the most someone can average week after week. You may be able to get in the zone for longer days now and then, and it’s certainly easier if you’re just working on one project week after week. But if you work involves any amount of gear switching, that takes a considerable toll on the kind of focus good coding requires.

Calendar Analytics for FileMaker


(Click for a larger version)

Timeboxing (estimating is too hard). A quick look at the calendar above and you’d be forgiven for thinking we’ve estimated all these jobs down to the hour and the spread those estimates across our calendar. Custom software is incredibly hard to estimate accurately. Instead, we’re timeboxing these deliveries: committing to deliver three, five, or ten hours of work, instead of committing to deliver a specific feature set.

Small chunks (estimate accuracy degrades with size). Planning a series of very small estimates and deliveries makes success much more likely. We spoke about this at DevCon in 2017, and it’s proved itself countless times since then: small chunks make a big difference.

These are calendar problems

The scheduling problems we’re grappling with above are not things you can solve on a spreadsheet or solely inside your project tracking system. Both your deliveries and the time you’ve blocked out to work are meaningless outside the context of your other commitments.

That’s why DayBack shows you multiple calendars at the same time, be that records from different tables and even different FileMaker files. Or you can use DayBack Online to show Google and Basecamp calendars alongside your FileMaker records. At SeedCode, the delivery dates you see in the movie above are FileMaker records, but we’re looking at them in a browser in DayBack Online so each developer can also see their personal Google calendars at the same time.

The key is to make delivery promises in the context of your other commitments; that’s the only way to make promises you can keep.

Beautiful DayBack Calendar Mod by Digital Fusion

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Here’s a beautiful calendar mod by Catherine Kirkland of Digital Fusion. She added new FileMaker layout elements to the right edge and bottom of the calendar. Looks great!

FileMaker Calendar Digital Fusion

DayBack Calendar is a web viewer on the FileMaker layout, so by moving the web viewer around, you can create layout space around it. Folks often put their own navigation elements above or to the left of the calendar, but this is the first one we’ve seen with such an elegant set of controls below the calendar.

I love the white space around the “previous contact” entries: even though the display is very dense, leaving that space around the email icons makes it easy to read.

Huge thanks to Catherine, her client, and the team at Digital Fusion for letting us share this with you. Digital Fusion is doing great work: check it out!

More DayBack Sidebar Mods

Here are few more examples of what other folks have done by adding FileMaker layout elements outside the calendar frame: sidebar examples.

 

Timezone Tooltips for DayBack Calendar

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Here’s a mod I can’t live without. This tooltip will translate your appointments into three other time zones. Also, it’s easy to customize so you can add more cities if you need to. This is also a great example of how fun it can be to use JavaScript within FileMaker because JS makes these kinds of timezone transformations much easier.

Timezone Tooltips for FileMaker

Transforming Times with Moment.js

DayBack includes the wonderful momentjs and moment-timezone libraries for working with dates and times. That makes a tooltip like this a lot easier. For example, if you want to translate the event’s start time into London’s time zone, you do this:

And if you want to turn that time into text like “in 34 minutes” you can just do this:

Having written tons of FileMaker functions for date and time parsing back in SeedCode Calendar’s early days, I’m in love with these momentjs functions.

Adding little JS tooltips to DayBack is also a great way to get your feet wet with JavaScript, and you’ll find some simple examples here to get you started.

Read Full Article →

Integrating FileMaker and Gmail Part 3 – Email Threads

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This is the third and final post in a series on using the Gmail API from FileMaker. Please review the previous articles, if you haven’t already, particularly the first one which covers setting your app up with Google and authentication. There’s also a great article by Brendan McBride from dbservices that covers importing emails from an inbox into FileMaker. This article can be seen as the first in the series as it leads directly to the ones we’ve done here.

Integrating FileMaker and Gmail Part 1 – Sending HTML Emails

Integrating FileMaker and Gmail Part 2 – Sending Attachments

dbservices – FileMaker Gmail Integration

As with the first article, all of these examples use the native Insert From URL script step so there won’t be any plug-ins required, and since the Insert From URL is supported in all aspects of the FileMaker platform, these techniques can be adapted to work on the Server, Go, FileMaker Cloud, and WebDirect. These techniques require FileMaker 16 or higher as they use the advanced cURL options introduced in that version.

Working With Threads

This article will be looking at working with email threads. It will cover querying for responses to a specific thread of emails and maintaining the thread correctly when responding to an email from FileMaker. Here’s a video overview along with a new free example file below:

FileMaker Gmail Integration: Example File

Please download the example file FM2Gmail v1.3 for a working demo. This new version adds the ability to receive incoming messages for existing threads and reply to them. This file replaces v1.2 from the previous article.

FileMaker Gmail Integration Example File

Latest FM2Gmail Example File

Managing Replies

At the end of our last example, we had successfully sent an HTML email with multiple attachments, but what if the correspondent responds to the message? If we want our outgoing message to be associated with a specific FileMaker record, then it’s likely we’ll want all the responses to this email, and all subsequent responses, to be associated with this record as well. Let’s look at this in action. I’ve sent a message from our example file to myself, and now I’m going to respond and add a new inline attachment to my response. Read Full Article →

Custom Tooltips for Your Calendar

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The latest in-app update to DayBack introduces custom tooltips. These tooltips are completely scriptable. You can customize the content and can style the tooltips (and their content) using your own CSS.

How It Works

Tooltips are triggered by a new calendar action: On Event Hover. This new action can call FileMaker scripts or execute JavaScript. It’s JavaScript you’ll use for the tooltips, and you can call a simple function to show any content you’d like. Here’s the Javascript for the example above:

dbk.tooltip(event.title);

That’s passing the event’s title into the tooltip function. You can also pass in more fields and use HTML to make it more readable. Here’s another field (resource), separated by a line break:

dbk.tooltip(event.title + ‘<br />’ + event.resource);

The tooltip documentation covers all this and provides a more thorough description of this JavaScript, lots of examples, and notes on styling this with CSS.

Going Further

There are a lot of possibilities here when you combine the On Event Hover actions running JavaScript inline with tooltips that will show any HTML you put in there. By adding some logic to your JavaScript you can have different tooltips for different kind of events, or show different tooltips on different views. Tooltips have access to any of the JS libraries in DayBack, including momentjs for formatting dates.

Writing tooltips like this is probably the easiest way to get started with JavaScript in FileMaker. You can show meaningful, user-facing results with just a single line of JS, and we can help. Let us know what you’re working on and we can point you in the right direction.

And if you have interesting use cases for running a FileMaker script on hover, we’d love to hear about that too. Don’t forget, you can also add buttons to DayBack to run your own scripts (FileMaker scripts or JavaScript) and buttons may make more sense for some actions. More here: custom button actions in DayBack.

Get It Now

If you’re already using DayBack, tooltips and the new On Event Hover action are free in-app updates. Just click “Check for Updates” from the upper right corner. If you’re new to in-app updates, you can see them in action here: how in-app updates add new features and preserve your customizations.

If you’re not yet using DayBack, download an unlocked trial, link it to your files, and see if it can make a difference for your team’s schedule…

 Download an Unlocked 30-Day Trial of DayBack  

Integrating FileMaker and Gmail Part 2 – Sending Attachments

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This is the second in a series of articles on using the Gmail API from FileMaker. The first article has some background on this approach as well as instructions for authenticating to the Gmail API and sending HTML emails. Please review that article here if you haven’t already. Additionally, there’s a great post by dbservices on integrating Gmail with FileMaker that lead to these articles and should be checked out as well.

As with the first article, all of these examples use the native Insert From URL script step so there won’t be any plug-ins required, and since the Insert From URL is supported in all aspects of the FileMaker platform, these techniques can be adapted to work on the Server, Go, FileMaker Cloud, and WebDirect. These techniques require FileMaker 16 or higher as they use the advanced cURL options introduced in that version.

In this article, we’re looking at sending large, multiple attachments via Gmail. Here’s a video overview along with a new free example file below.

 

FileMaker Gmail Integration: Example File

Please download the example file FM2Gmail v1.2 for a working demo. This new version adds the ability to send attachments and replaces v1.1 from the previous article.

FileMaker Gmail Integration

FM2Gmail Example File v1.2

Sending an Email with Attachments from FileMaker

Before we can send anything, we do need to authenticate our app with Google. Please refer to our previous article’s section on Getting Started / Authentication if you need to review these steps. Once we’re all authenticated, we can compose a new e-mail with attachments. You’ll notice in the new example file that the compose window has a new paper clip button for adding attachments. This button brings up a Card window which we can use to drag attachments in, add individual attachments and import entire folders of images or text files. Read Full Article →

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