FM to Google Translate, Indexing Secrets, FM to Zapier

It’s a brand new year and lot’s of exciting things are happening in the FileMaker world!

Translating using Google Translate with FileMaker

It turns out to be pretty easy, but costs for every word translated. I’d like to find a way to translate labels and tags in FileMaker on the fly – and store them of, course, for later use.  That would allow a user to translate a database into their language on the fly.  There would be limitations, of course, but still would be interesting.

Translation

There’s also a free example file at the link (kudos to Douglas Alder for this).

Source: Making FileMaker interact with Google Translate | HomeBase Software

Indexing Text vs Numbers

Honza did some interesting – and eyebrow raising – testing on indexing text and numbers.  One of his startling conclusions:

The longest search time was measured when searching in indexed text field containing unique values. It was even almost twice as slow as searching in unindexed field.

There’s more:

If you are likely to have repeating values from a value list in your field, having a value index is definitely going to help. If you’re going to store natural text in your field and likely to search for words that appear many times, word index is probably going to be your friend. But if your text field is going to hold unique values, the index overhead is something you may want to avoid.

Read Honza’s post if you need to optimize indexing on your databases.  Or even if you don’t…it’s valuable insight.

Source: Text or Numbers – What’s Faster

Connect FileMaker to Zapier (and to hundreds of services) for free

This was announced at Devcon 2017 and requires some beta testing and setup, but the benefits are awesome:

The fmGateway for Zapier allows your custom FileMaker apps to communicate with a huge number of web applications using Zapier. For example:

  • new leads from your website can be automatically collected into your database
  • ecommerce orders can be imported automatically
  • SMS updates can be sent automatically to alert clients in changes to their order
  • customers can be automatically subscribed to your newsletter
  • invoices can be sent via PayPal or Invoice Ninja
  • updates can be sent to Slack and vice-versa

Every FileMaker developer knows the future lies in integrating with the rest of the world.  This tool will make that task easier.

Source: FREE fmGateway for Zapier – soSIMPLE Software/Paradise Partners

 

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