After taking a couple of years off,  I am happy to announce that I will once again be speaking at the FileMaker Developer’s conference.  The 2011 conference will be held in San Diego, CA, August 2-5, 2011 (Tuesday-Friday). I am very excited to be doing this again. I thoroughly enjoy speaking about FileMaker and can’t wait get back up on the stage.

In the past my sessions have often focused on how to use Database Transactions with FileMaker scripts.  Transactions can solve some very tricky issues, so I was very focused on the concept of a transaction, what it was, and how to use them in FileMaker, etc.  But over the years that I have been scripting this way I have seen that these same techniques or very similar ones can solve a broader array of problems.  Script triggers and other newer features also have something to add to this conversation as well.  So this time around, I wanted to loosen up a bit and go deeper.

I decided to focus on the very lowest level in this whole process and dig into exactly how FileMaker decides what data to save and exactly when it saves it.  Armed with this understanding, we can solve a wide array of problems that might otherwise plague complex FileMaker systems.

I titled my presentation “Understanding Commit Record”.

Here is the abstract

FileMaker Pro “commits” data to its database. Normally this process happens in the background, without developers worrying about it.  But sometimes it is very useful to take control of this process so we can decide exactly when and exactly what data gets committed to the database.
In this sessions we will learn the nature of the commit record process and we will see how we can control commits to solve some tricky problems. For exampke; how to mitigate the issue of the iPhone ringing and halting a script in a FileMaker Go application,  how to build interfaces that allow the user to “cancel” the changes they have just made to a few records in the database, elegantly handle multi-user record locking, or even how to speed up large batch operations.
A good solid understanding of the commit record process will carry you a long way towards building better, more robust solutions.
I hope to see you all in San Diego.  If you have any topics you would like me to cover, or issues you would like to see addressed in this preso, just post them to the comments.