FILEMAKER: So, What Are The Benefits Of Anchor / Buoy

From Dwayne Wright - Certified FileMaker 9 Developer
www.dwaynewright.com
info@dwaynewright.com
TWITTER: dwaynewright

Hey, the relationship graph is now readable in Anchor / Buoy. Due to its left to right construct, colors, naming convention and overall order, it is much easier to read. As your FileMaker solution grows (and practically all of them do), it is a more elegant and orderly growth process.

So now that we have covered what Anchor / Buoy is and how to do Anchor / Buoy, let us reward you by discussing what you get out of it.

- Bi-Directional is a feature in FileMaker where a relationship can travel to and from a pair of table occurrences. It certainly sounds like a good thing but its benefits don’t scale well. Think of a bi-directional text on a page of a book. Think of how much space you could have it you could read a line of text in two directions. However, most FileMaker develoers are programmed that a line of text is read from left to right. With Anchor/Buoy, this is the same thing and makes reading of relationships easier.

- Since every layout is linked to a base table only and there is only one base table per relational graph, you are consistently working with data that is down stream.

- We haven’t discussed the “evaluate from” area in the calculation box much. It is source table occurrence for the calculation. Well, in the anchor buoy method, you can always evaluate from a base table because it is always in capital letters and has no underscores.

- In the SPAGHETTI or Spider relationship setup, when you drag a field on to a layout, you will normally see all the TOs in the relationship graph to pick from. Anchor / Buoy filters this information via context, so you only see the relevant TOs for that base table.

- In the SPAGHETTI or Spider relationship setup, the setup of a GTRR is also susceptible to the same problem and anchor buoy gives the same benefits.

- When adding new TOs to the relationship graph, you always know to put it next to the corresponding base table in the relationship graph. This also makes it easier to find that TO if you need to edit the relationship to it.
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More info about the author and FileMaker in general, contact me at info@dwaynewright.com.

© 2008 - Dwayne Wright - dwaynewright.com

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