Four Questions Before You Build Your FileMaker Layout

Overview

Generating a layout is not the risky part. Accepting the schema it implies without checking is.

Here is what we run before the screen gets built, whether the layout takes ten seconds or two hours.

Ask these four first

• does every value on this screen have exactly one home in the schema
• which field is authoritative when two disagree
• what does the user do immediately after this screen, and does the structure support it
• what happens to the records that already exist in the old shape

If you cannot answer all four in a sentence each, the layout is going to look finished while the structure is still wrong. That is the worst state to be in, because everyone thinks you are nearly done.

What this looks like in practice

On a scheduling system last year, question three killed a generated layout we quite liked. The screen showed a job perfectly. But the dispatcher’s next move was to reassign it to another crew, and the schema stored crew as text on the job record rather than a relationship. Reassignment meant editing strings.

So we changed the table structure first, then generated again. Second version took ten seconds and was correct.

The tooling is fine. The order of operations is what gets people.

Which of those four questions would fail on the solution you are working in right now?