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Automatic Resource Filtering

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DayBack is designed to be customized, and you can transform both the way it behaves and the way it looks.

KC Embrey’s latest customization adds a new button to automate resource filters. You might need this if you have many resources (people, equipment, or rooms) and want to see a scheduling grid but don’t want to see blank rows for all the resources that don’t have any appointments. Here’s how it works:

That button was added using a few custom actions. Actions are small pieces of JavaScript you can tie to existing behaviors in DayBack, like when the calendar first renders or when you click on an event. In some simple actions, the JavaScript just calls a FileMaker script. In others, like in this example, the actions change the way the calendar behaves.

In DayBack’s documentation, you’ll find lots of example actions you can copy and paste into your DayBack. There are three kinds of action examples:

  • Button actions – triggered by a button you create
  • Event actions – that run when you do something to an event: like create, edit, or delete it.
  • App actions – these run when you take action in the calendar interface, like select a filter.

If you’re new to JavaScript, you may find customizing one of these example actions to be a lot more fun than writing JS from scratch.

Add this to your DayBack

If automatic filtering looks useful, you can add that behavior to your DayBack. (For FileMaker calendars, this requires DayBack for FileMaker 19.) Learn more about custom app actions and download the JavaScript and CSS for this behavior here: Automatic Resource Filtering.

We’re happy to write custom actions for you as part of an implementation package for DayBack; just let us know what you’d like your calendar to do for you.

Improved Charts for Resource Scheduling in FileMaker 19

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The latest update to DayBack for FileMaker 19 improves charting options when plotting resources activities against your goals.

On the Pivot-List view, you’ll now find an option to combine all the resource activities into a single curve when charting activity over time. This means it’s now easier to chart a team’s performance, instead of just individual resources’ performance. Here’s what this looks like in action:

In this example, our “team” is any collection of resources–even if they’re not all in the same folder. And “resources” can be anything in your organization that gets overscheduled: trucks, people, or rooms. Some of our most successful customers use resources for business processes or departments.

Find more about resource scheduling in DayBack here (the video towards the top of the page is a great introduction): Resource & Field Service Scheduling.

To learn more about charting and analytics, look here: Introduction to Calendar Analytics.

Remember, once you get a view/chart set up the way you like, you can save and share that using DayBack’s bookmarks. So take your time building a great set of filters that chart the outcomes you’re most interested in, then save that view so you can check in on your progress.  Enjoy!

Explore DayBack for FileMaker 19

FileMaker 19 Add-Ons

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We’ve packaged up DayBack Calendar as an add-on: and if you watch the video below, I think you’ll agree that FileMaker 19 add-ons are a game-changer for developers.

What Are FileMaker 19 Add-Ons?

“Add-on” can refer to both the new objects being inserted into your file–a chart widget, for example, could be called an add-on. And “add-on” can refer to the way those objects are added to your file. This new way of installing things is what’s so revolutionary about add-ons. We’ve had chart widgets for years, but installing them could be tricky. The add-on tech introduced in FM19 makes installation much, much simpler.

You can download an app as a .fmp12 file, or download the same file packaged up as an add-on. One, you’ll add to your file the old copy-and-paste way, and one you’ll add to your file using the new add-on process. The end result is the same. However, installing as an add-on is crazy fast. Check this out…

Download & Get Started

Please play with DayBack and see what it feels like to use a new FileMaker 19 add-on: download the DayBack add-on here and then follow along in the video above. When it comes to placing the video in FileMaker’s extensions folder, here’s where it goes:

Mac: HD/Users/YOU/Library/Application Support/FileMaker/Extensions/AddonModules
Windows: AppData\Local\FileMaker\Extensions\AddonModules

If you want to continue after that and begin using DayBack with your own records, check out this overview, then follow our instructions here for creating your first calendar.

The add-on package for DayBack is really just a bunch of JSON, not a FileMaker file you can open and use. If you want to download a copy of DayBack you can play with before installing it into your file, download a copy here: DayBack Calendar for FileMaker 19.

Learn How to Make FileMaker 19 Add-Ons

We expect that Claris will eventually publish some documentation to go with the new “Save a Copy as Add-on Package” script step in FileMaker 19. But I doubt they’ll improve on the level of detail Jeremy Brown has provided in his overview. Those are the best instructions currently available: Creating FileMaker Add-Ons.

Add-On Tech is Here, but New Add-Ons Are Not

If FileMaker 19 add-ons are so cool, why hasn’t Claris shipped their own add-ons yet? That’s a good question and probably points to the fact that the add-on tech isn’t completely finished. There are a few rough edges:

  • You can see things that still need to be polished in the way add-on leave comments behind on the relationship when the add-on is uninstalled
  • Some aspects of the add-on’s info.json file don’t appear to be respected, or maybe they’re just not in use yet.
  • You may find your object names prefaced with “com.fmi” if you install add-ons using a system language other than English. For example, you may see layout names like “com.fmi.DayBack Calendar Layout.” That’s not great, but add-ons are easy to uninstall.

Remember that the core add-on tech has been in FileMaker since version 17, where it was used to deliver “add-on tables” like notes and attachments. Those original add-ons are still here in 19, and you can add them to your file just like you add DayBack.

FileMaker 19 Add-Ons

Given all that, should I use add-ons? It seems to us that the newest and most fragile part of the add-on tech is the object you’re supposed to drag on to your layouts, and how that object is uniquely named and referenced in your scripts. DayBack’s add-on doesn’t use that at all. So, providing that you switch your machine to English before installing, we don’t think there will be any problems using DayBack’s add-on.

We expect Claris to include a number of refinements to add-on tech in the next release of FileMaker 19. If you’d like to hold off on using add-ons, you can still install DayBack by hand. Either link DayBack to your file (very quick) or embed it manually (kind of tedious, but not hard). Instructions for both methods are available here.

Coding is Sharing

FileMaker developers have been looking forward to this tech for a long time. Enhancements like this make code more portable and more encapsulated. They are accelerants for the community of 3rd party apps and developers and, in our opinion, are some of the most effective enhancements Claris can make to the platform. Very psyched to see this coming to life: cheers to the product team. And cheers to Todd and Jeremy for publishing their instructions on how to package add-ons!

New – DayBack Calendar for FileMaker 19

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Here it is. The best calendar we’ve ever built is also the easiest to integrate and customize. We’ve been eagerly anticipating a few of the changes in FileMaker 19 that let high-end add-ons like DayBack integrate seamlessly with FileMaker.

And we’ve done a lot of work to make sure FileMaker developers can customize every aspect of the calendar.

All the calendar features we’ve deployed to Salesforce and Google are now available to our FileMaker developers. And things like Calendar publishing and WebDirect access that were separate subscriptions are now included. The same layouts, scripts, and behaviors now work in FileMaker Pro, Go, and WebDirect. (Even logging into your Google Calendars from within FileMaker works just as smoothly in WebDirect.)

Watch a 5-min video of the new DayBack in action:

Read Full Article →

Reschedule Multiple Events

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Your calendar’s latest power-up: now select multiple events and reschedule them all at once. Multiple-selection is a free in-app update to DayBack for FileMaker. Here’s how it works…

Multiple-selection makes it easier to reschedule whole projects and to shift your plans from one day to another.

Do More

• Drag events to reschedule them or to change their resource or status.

• A single undo is available, making this great for trying out scenarios.

• Your records are still edited with the same FileMaker script used throughout DayBack. So any customizations you’ve made to that script will continue to work when batch-editing events.

• Check out the documentation for more details.

Can I Automatically Link Events Together?

Yes, you can permanently link events together, instead of manually selecting them each time. For example, you can chain all the items for a project together so that date changes cascade through downstream events. You’ll find instructions here: add cascading events to DayBack for FileMaker.

Add This to Your DayBack: In-App Update

This feature is available as an in-app update to DayBack and doesn’t require any FileMaker changes if you’re already using the latest DayBack Calendar. If you’re new to in-app updates, or it’s been a while since you used them, here’s an overview: in-app updates in DayBack.

If you’ve purchased DayBack Calendar on a monthly or yearly subscription, you have access to in-app updates for the life of your subscription. But if you bought DayBack outright, your included updates end after the first year.

Not to worry, when your first year ends, you can subscribe to in-app updates here: extend your updates.

 

 

Color Coding Your FileMaker Calendar by Resource

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By default, DayBack color-codes your events by their status: more precisely, by whatever you’ve mapped to the status field. Coloring by status makes sense since many of DayBack’s scheduling views already put events into their own columns or rows by resources.

But if you’d like to add a second color for the event’s resource, you can do that by changing the event styling in DayBack to add a second color.

In this example, we’ll add a frame around each event where the frame’s color corresponds to the event’s resource. (Note that the technique used here will let you base the frame on the contents of any field, not just resource.)

FileMaker Calendar Color Coding

If you don’t like the frames’ width or colors, you can change that in the CSS the follows below. And if you’d like to see a completely different way to display a second color, check out this post where you’ll learn how to add a header-color to each event.

Add A Second Color to Your Calendar

Begin by changing the way your event title is mapped in DayBack. Edit the definition of the field “DBk_EventSummaryCalc” in your events table, adding this string at the very beginning of that field:

<dbk-css class=”ResourceName”></dbk-css>

Where “ResourceName” is the contents of the field you mapped to your resource in DayBack’s source layout. The string above shows what your calculation should evaluate as; in FileMaker’s calc dialog, you’ll actually add a calculation like this in front of your existing DBk_EventSummaryCalc…

“<dbk-css class=” & Quote ( YourResourceField ) & “></dbk-css>” &

That dbk-css string creates a class using the resource name of your event. Once you have a class with the resource name, add the following CSS to DayBack and you’ll see a colored frame for each resource. If you haven’t changed DayBack’s CSS before, here’s an overview (be sure to click through to the section on editing themes).

A few things to keep in mind:

  • You’ll want to create specific CSS for each resource: you’ll see three resources in the CSS below, following /* Resource Name 1 */ and then /* Resource Name 2 */, etc.
  • If your resource name has more than one word, like “Beth Reynolds”, you’ll replace that space with a period in the CSS, so Beth Reynolds becomes Beth.Reynolds

Here are some example CSS styles to create colored frames for three resources: Beth Reynolds, James Woolsey, and Peter Samuels…

That’s it! Big thanks to KC Embrey who worked out the CSS for this mod.

Please get in touch if y have questions about adding colors or styling your calendar. You should be able to understand your calendar at a glance, and we’re here to help.

 

Plotting Irregular Shapes in FileMaker Maps

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SeedCode’s ProMaps template comes with support for “neighborhoods” or areas: shapes our users employ to depict things like sales territories or city borders. Usually, these areas are a single, contiguous shape, like the neighborhoods in Seattle shown in red below in a stock copy of ProMaps.

Google Maps Template for FileMaker


Stock copy of ProMaps showing neighborhood areas in red

But what if an area consists of multiple separated shapes? Much of the time, city, municipal, and congressional boundaries are not just made up of one simple shape, but a set of multiple shapes. Or maybe you want to represent something like national forest boundaries or oil fields as in the examples below:

Areas in ProMaps for FileMaker


Oil fields in Indiana; all red areas are one “area” in ProMaps

Oil fields in FileMaker Pro Maps


Zoomed in on oil fields.

It turns out that this can be done with a very small tweak to ProMaps. To do this, we need to first define how to separate the multiple arrays of latitude/longitude pairs for one area. For this example, we’ll stick with formatting similar to JSON. This means each polygon will be wrapped in brackets ( [ ] ), and separated with a comma. When specifying multiple polygons, our object is going to be an array of arrays, so everything will need to be enclosed in brackets to define it as a single array object. Here’s the template for how multi-polygon area data should look:

The next step is to update the “Set Variable [ $sc_areaBorderCoordinates…” script step on line 26 of the “Export Map HTML” script. We’ll update the calculation value with the following:

It’s important to note that we’re sticking with ProMaps’ use of return characters to indicate the separation between each lat/long pair. Because of this, it’s vital that you follow the format in the example (no extra line breaks), or the substitute function will result in a malformed object.

With this one script change and formatted data, you’ll be able to see multiple polygons drawn on the map for a single area!

Learn more about the ProMaps template

Resource Scheduling Grid in FileMaker

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DayBack’s scheduling grids highlight gaps in your schedule across multiple weeks, so you know if you’re on track or overextended. These multi-week views are designed to be customized, and we’ve recently helped a customer create an exquisite depiction of their workload.

A Customized Scheduling Grid

SeedCode’s Ann Kiser customized this view in collaboration with our customer, Pär-Anders Björklund, from Linjepunkt Repro in Sweden. Linjepunkt offers high-end retouching and image processing services; the grid below shows their current project at the left and their resource allocation for each day.

Resource Scheduling in FileMaker


Customized scheduling grid for Linjepunkt Repro

Based on DayBack’s Built-in Pivot Views

This customization is a compact version of the “pivot views” built into DayBack Calendar. Below you’ll find a couple of screenshots from this stock pivot view. The first has “compression” set to off so that you see all of the text for each event. The second image has compression turned on, so each event only takes up one line.

FileMaker Calendar Scheduling


Built-in pivot view showing trucks as rows and days as columns

Field Service Scheduling in FileMaker


Built-in pivot view with compression turned on

In addition to this version, where each column is a day, pivot views are also available at smaller time scales. In those “timed” versions, each column is anywhere between five minutes and one hour.

Note that both of the screens above have calendar analytics turned on. The analytics chart that the bottom of the screen is reporting the value of the net invoice field in each appointment’s record. You’ll see a colored line for the invoiced amounts from the three resources/trucks. The orange dotted line represents a goal of $2,100.00 per day, per truck.

Charting Resource Revenue with Calendar Analytics for FileMaker


Configuring analytics to sum the values in a specific field

While this example uses analytics to track money, you can also use it to track time. Inside SeedCode, we use analytics to budget our time and make sure we’re able to keep our promises to customers. Here’s a short video on how we use analytics to track customizations to DayBack: Schedule Balancing with Calendar Analytics.

Resource scheduling, pivot views, and analytics are all built into DayBack Calendar for FileMaker.

Big thanks to Pär-Anders for letting us share this work!

 

How We Spend Our Time

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The holidays often occasion a wintry mix of goal setting and castigation. Sometimes we need to change how we work. Other times, we just feel something is missing. Whatever the reasons, the seasonal shame spiral gets real.

Keep your self-improvement projects in perspective with these two posts from dayback.com.

And be kind to yourself this holiday season =)

Time Shame Road Trip

Time Shame: Plan Your Day Like a Road Trip

Our industry’s focus on productivity can encourage us to be ashamed of how we spend our time. Shame isn’t a signal to cram more into your schedule.

Projects Running Late

We Can’t See Late: The Consequences of Getting a Late Start are Widely Misunderstood

If projects are frequently running late, it’s often because we can’t recognize projects slipping until the slip is unavoidably large.

 

Earthquakes, JSON, and Automation in FileMaker Maps

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FileMaker can do a lot more with the Google Maps API than just showing pins on the map and creating routes. This mod of SeedCode’s ProMaps template is a great example: it reacts to earthquake alerts. It visualizes the impact zones for seismic events and reports on the affected properties.

Alan Corkhill at Marx Okubo recently had us put together some significant customizations to their copy of ProMaps, integrating data on seismic events (earthquakes) from ShakeAlert. The ultimate result is that, when data on new seismic activity is received, the data is automatically imported into ProMaps, creating a visual representation of the severity waves from the event and which properties are likely to be affected. FileMaker then creates reports for those properties, including images from ProMaps.

Connecting FileMaker, Google Maps, and Seismic Event JSON

This was quite a broad, challenging project, but the end result is fantastic. Here’s a little more detail on how we accomplished this:

Using Jason Young’s example file for integrating Gmail with FileMaker, a server-side script periodically checks a special mailbox for new alerts. The script scans those emails for seismic event details: specifically, for a link to the full details of the event.

We then use that link to download a JSON file with all of the details of the event and parse the data into FileMaker records. Those records contain “zone” data, which includes:

• Latitude and longitude data for points of a polygon (the impact zones)
• A percentage likelihood that properties in that zone will be affected by this event

With this data, we can load the map with a visual representation of each of these zones.

FileMaker Map Showing Earthquake Data

Next, using Google’s JavaScript API, we determine which properties fall within a zone of the seismic event and send that data back to FileMaker for reporting.

The last step in this process is creating the reports: each needs a picture of the property on the map’s satellite view. The trick here is that this all needs to happen on the server, rather than a FileMaker Pro client. How did we make that happen? We used PhantomJSCloud. PhantomJSCloud is a service that renders a page as if you were viewing it in a browser, then takes a screen-shot and sends that back, all with a simple Insert from URL (CURL) command. This allows us to process the seismic event data, render the map, and take the images for the property reports, all using FileMaker server-side scripts.

Here’s the final result for an example property:

Automatic Earthquake Impact Report from Filemaker

This whole solution has been implemented in a series of small deliveries, and now it’s great to see everything come together like this, up and running in Web Direct. Big thanks to, Alan, for letting us share this work!

Learn more about adding ProMaps to your file

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