One of the new features of Filemaker 9 - released a couple of weeks ago in mid-July, 2007 - is something called Conditional Formatting for fields. In earlier versions, display tricks such as red or green buttons, different kinds of text formatting and similar things required some trickery with calculations, custom functions and container fields that would hold color blocks. All this was central to the Lightbar in PolicePro - the row of red and green buttons that displays whether a given police car or officer is in or out of service. WIth Conditional Formatting, I had an opportunity to remove several layers from the existing process.

Of course, that means that to properly take advantage of the new function, we need to rewrite the whole thing. Since we're doing that, we might as well throw in some enhancements that would make sense to the dispatchers running the system.

What a pain in the ass it is to get this stuff exactly right! I rewrote the entire function on a single computer to where it ran flawlessly. When it came time to test it across a LAN with some other desktops, we realized that the red/green stuff I had changed wasn't working over the network the way I had rewritten it. Had to go at it all over again to remove all globals and use calculation fields instead with a new discrete relationship from PolicePro to to a single record in Preferences.

I decided the default state for any new car added to the roster should be a green button and an "In Service" tooltip. Any button that did not have a car assignment needed to open as red with no tooltip notations.

Then it occurred to me that if no location was entered when a green button was clicked, the button should stay green - an additional If statement.

After a day of tweaking and testing, it's this script (times 10, for the 10 possible Lightbar buttons) to control the actions of the lightbar stuff ends up nicely organized, easily readable and very straightforward.

The final step was to go back through the thing and comment the hell out of it for the future, the single most important thing I've learned over the last 11 years of doing this work.

Yep, it's mid July again, and that can only mean we're heading for North Carolina. Greg and I will be conducting business from the wireless-equipped decks of our respective beach houses as needed. This year there seems to be a pretty good pile of stuff to work on when we're not out on the beach or trying to turn over the Hobie Cat in the Sound: we're into the wrap-up phase of the new IBR capabilities of PolicePro, writing all the exception stuff that will catch errors or non-tagged required fields for the reports; compiling the final system for a Child Advocacy center that will be going in service the week we return; and enabling all the new Filemaker 9 capabilities that we can now talk about since yesterday's public release of FM9. It's been tough keeping quiet on this stuff, with the huge new SQL and Oracle data exchange and some of the PDF changes they've brought about. We're fired up now and ready to go with a bunch of it.

In the meantime, there's the daily trip up to the Crab Pot for fresh fish, Jimmy Buffett music playing in the bar there, our three busy beach houses and the nicest stretch of unoccupied beach on the East Coast. I've been hitting this place for over fifty years now, and it never fails to deliver. I hope everyone out there has a place like this in their lives, whether it's a beach, a mountain lake, whatever... this stuff is irreplaceable.