There has been a bit of talk lately about ways to store and manage custom functions. There are a lot of tools and some great websites for finding and managing them, and I thought I’d share ours.
The real key for us is that with FileMaker Pro Advanced, you can copy and paste custom functions, and so we wrote a small plugin to grab the clipboard contents and store the function in a database, or to push the record as a function back to the clipboard.
This lets us manage all our CFs in a database, and move them in groups into systems as we need them. I think this works better than having a “starter file” with your functions in it.
With starter files, you can end up with version control issues,and you end up with CFs you don’t need in solutions just because they are part of your “default set”.
So here is our database we use, and in it are instructions on how to grab the plugin (if you need just the plugin the mac version is here and the windows one here.) We included a few of our custom functions as well as a couple that we got from the community. We tried to attribute everyone who we got custom functions from, if we have work of yours that is improperly attributed, please let me know and I’ll correct it. I want to give particular thanks to John Sindelar, Ray Cologon and Mickhail Edoshin.
