I had a feature request for BaseElements that to me sound perfectly reasonable : When you're creating a new window by holding down the option key, can you put it a few pixels below and to the left of the current window in the exact same way the "New Window" command does. Sounds perfectly fine to me, it will be a pain to put into all those scripts, but makes sense and probably should be done.

I had one thought though that makes this a little tricky : What if you're on windows and have the window maximised. Obviously it shouldn't do anything at all. You don't want to lose the maximised state just because you've opened a new window. So surely there's a "Get ( WindowState )" type function that will tell me if the current window is maximised or not. Well it turns out there isn't.

So how do you tell if a window is maximised? First, this is a windows only function, so check for that. Then check if the window size is as big as can fit on the screen, so compare WindowHeight and WindowWidth to WindowDesktopHeight and WindowDesktopWidth. They should be different only by four pixels, which is the width of a window border. Plus the window should be positioned at the top left of the screen.

But you can easily manually create a window that size and that position, that isn't maximised. The second trick is to compare the WindowWidth to the WindowContentWidth. This is the size of the FileMaker "desktop" so to speak. And if you have a window that is the same size as the desktop, and positioned on the top left, it slightly expands the WindowContentWidth to show properly. In other words you get the scroll bars on the main FileMaker background. When it's maximised there is a fixed distance between the two, depending on which LayoutViewState you have ( Form, List or Table view ).

So with all that smarts we can create a CustomFunction called "IsWindowMaximised" that takes no parameters. The function ( for FileMaker 11 ) is :

---

Let (

diff = Case (
Get ( LayoutViewState ) = 0 ; 16 ;
Get ( LayoutViewState ) = 1 ; 19 ;
Get ( LayoutViewState ) = 2 ; 31 ) ;

( Get ( SystemPlatform ) = -2 ) and
( Get ( WindowHeight ) = ( Get ( WindowDesktopHeight ) - 4 ) ) and
( Get ( WindowWidth ) = ( Get ( WindowDesktopWidth ) - 4 ) ) and
( Get ( WindowLeft ) = 0 ) and
( Get ( WindowTop ) = 0 ) and
( ( Get ( WindowWidth ) - diff ) = Get ( WindowContentWidth ) ) )

---

Simple eh?

Be aware though that this version only applies to FileMaker 11, although it should also work fine in 10. In earlier versions the left side status bar will alter what I've used as the "diff" variable. With the status bar hidden, the values are similar to the above ( except for Table view which is 19 ), but with the status bar shown, the diff value needs to be 85.

I've tested this on XP and Win 7, but not vista although I assume it would be the same as 7.

I hope this is of use to someone else somewhere.

As for when I will build this into BaseElements, well I think it's a really good suggestion so I will do it. It's just that there are 1000+ GTRR steps that do the "New Window" option in BaseElements, two for every single link you can click on. One is a normal GTRR and another for GTRR using the found set. So there's a lot to change :) My kingdom for a completely dynamic GTRR step where I can program the "New Window", "use Found Set" and "From Table" options, not just the destination layout.

Thanks to Chaim from ProductiveIT for the idea and help with testing.

Late last night I uploaded BaseElements 3.0.0. With no b, fc, x, y or z in the version number this makes it a final release. Since the last fc release I've incremented the plugin to fix a variable detection issue, updated a bunch of bits and pieces related to variables and plugins, and made some other minor tweaks.

The download links are on the regular download page.

Thanks to everyone who has been helping me test, in particular Doug, Chaim, Bart, Scott, Bruce, Ward but also lots of others.

Another day, another BaseElements release. This time is special though, it will certainly be the last for a few days, as I fly out to San Diego tomorrow for DevCon. I'm really looking forward to it this year it should be a good show.

And finally I have no outstanding issues in BaseElements land, and so I'm declaring this version to be a final candidate. Or release candidate. Or whatever it is that comes after beta. We've solved the plugin issues, and also added a workaround for the character encoding issue thanks to some nifty programming and text editing by our intrepid plugin developer.

On to the links :

BaseElements_Mac.dmg - fp7 files.
BaseElements_Mac_Runtime.dmg - Runtime.

BaseElements_Win.zip - fp7 files.
BaseElements_Win_Runtime.zip - Runtime.

Other than an updated plugin, the other changes since b10 are :

• Fixed an issue that would cause the files not to display or show record access issues in some situations.
• Fixed a false out of memory error when importing files with large ( 10 MB ) nodes caused by large embedded images.
• Added in the new BE logo.
• Resolved some startup window position issues.
• Some minor layout tweaks.

I've also posted a fairly complete BaseElements 3 New Features page.

The character encoding problem.

I'm really glad that we were able to build in a workaround for a new behaviour in the FMPA 11 DDR that causes XML validation issues in some situtations. I've filed a bug report about it to FileMaker, but that may not get fixed for a while and in the mean time telling people to wait until "someone else fixes it" or "change your solution", isn't a satisfactory answer for me.

Side note : if anyone else notices this issue, and it causes problems, it would be great help if you could either add a comment to that report, or file your own with a sample file. The more reports the more likely this will be fixed sooner.

The issue is that when you have certain legitimate characters inside a calculation quote, the DDR output doesn't properly encode these characters and so produces invalid XML. The problem is that it can't be imported back into anything as it fails the first check of validity. It also affects copy paste actions in FMP.

The character encoding solution.

We've added a checkbox to BaseElements setup that is called "Filter XML". I'll write up a more detailed FAQ page about this, but the quick version is that it preprocesses your XML files and removes any invalid XML. This doesn't affect the output as these can only be inside quoted text, so you still have all the available data, but now your xml is also valid and will import just fine. By building this into the plugin we were able to make the process quite quick.

In fact a big solution that takes about 33 minutes to import only had 40 seconds added to the import time by the preprocessing of it's 500MB of XML data. I'm really excited that we were able to make this happen at all and to make it happen with an almost insignificant cost in import time is a double bonus.

Now I'm just looking forward to showing off the new version at DevCon and catching up with everyone.

And if you're not coming to DevCon, don't forget the 30% discount coupon : "elementary". Only valid until the 18th of August.

I've just finished uploading a minor update to BaseElements 2 to bring it to 2.6.8. Only a couple of small changes in this version :

* Update the registration code to accept BE v3 licences.
* Updated the file plugin to include Troi File 5.0.
* Updated the dialog plugin to include Troi Dialog 5.5.

The download links are :

Single User Version fp7 Files

BaseElements_Mac.dmg File Size 2.5 MB
BaseElements_Win.zip File Size 2.3 MB

Sharing Enabled Version fp7 Files

BaseElements_Mac_MU.dmg File Size 2.5 MB
BaseElements_Win_MU.zip File Size 2.3 MB

Single User Runtime Application

BaseElements_Mac_Runtime.dmg File Size 38.5 MB
BaseElements_Win_Runtime.zip File Size 41.6 MB

The plugin updates mean BaseElements 2 will run on Windows 7 as well as the latest FMP versions on all platforms. The critical change is the ability to accept a BE 3 licence. Any new purchases from today will automatically get a v3 licence, which will also work with 2.6.8. Also anyone who purchased v2 after 1st of March 2010 will automatically get a v3 licence sent out to them.