What Is Advanced Scripting?

Chapter 9, "Getting Started with Scripting," presented an introduction to FileMaker Pro scripting techniques. It covered such topics as error trapping, linking scripts together via subscripts, conditional branching, looping scripts, and using custom dialogs. These are all essential scripting techniques you should become familiar with.

This chapter explores several additional scripting techniques, including working with script variables, script input/output techniques, and managing windows. Although we think that everyone can potentially benefit from learning these techniques, they do require a solid familiarity with general scripting techniques, calculation formulas, and the Relationships Graph. For this reason, we have opted to present these as advanced scripting techniques.

This chapter does not present a comprehensive overview of scripting techniques. Indeed, such an overview could require an entire book of its own. Rather, we have chosen techniques that highlight new features of FileMaker 8 and that we think will have the broadest appeal. This book's companion volume, FileMaker 8 Functions and Scripts Desk Reference, contains a comprehensive listing of script steps, along with notes and examples; refer to that source for additional information about script steps used throughout this chapter.