Dr. Bott’s Blog for Resellers » Post Topic » Name-Value options for FileMaker Compared

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Aug

Name-Value options for FileMaker ComparedPosted by Chris  Published in FileMaker Development, IT DepartmentIntroduction & Overview

We’ve been using a family of functions at Dr. Bott to handle what is often called by the developer community as name-value pairs (NVP). We call these Property Lists and they are analogous associative arrays or hashes. We’ve been using these in production since 2007 and decided to open source them at FM DevCon 2013. You may download the current solution version here: PropertyList.fmp12 We use property lists throughout the in-house solution at Dr. Bott. Some of the most common uses are to pass multiple, nested values between scripts via Script Parameters and Script Results. We also leverage the same data structure as a way to bridge between other programming languages, such as PHP and Python. In the last year, with the growing popularity of NOSQL document store techniques, we started using then to store larger sets of state information into FileMaker records using a blob text field, for scenarios that don’t warrant extensive table expansion.

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