I'm getting more serious about development and am wondering what the
peanut gallery thinks of the CoreSolutions standards.

http://www.coresolutions.on.ca/FileMaker/Standards.pdf

I haven't gotten deep into them, but there were a couple things I liked
(dialog phrasing, folder structure) and some I didn't like, namely
their field naming conventions with underscores and z and k, etc. and
the idea of not allowing users to manually create portal records.

Are there other standards out there? Should I continue to use my own
(internally consistent and not obscure) way of naming fields?


G

The CoreSolutions standards have some nice ideas (and some other, overly
complex ideas), but those standards were written years ago and are
somewhat out of date since the release of FileMaker 7.

A consortium of FileMaker developers and users have more recently gotten
together and put together a nice set of standards that is available on
FileMaker's website, at
<http://www.filemaker.com/downloads/pdf/FMDev_ConvNov05.pdf>. I
recommend taking a look at that and pulling out of it whatever works for
you.

No matter whose standards you follow -- or which mixed and matched
combination of standards you decide to go with -- the most important
thing is that you have your own standards and that you are consistant.

Good luck...
Howard


Grip wrote:

--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Howard Schlossberg (818) 883-2846
FM Pro Solutions Los Angeles, California

FileMaker 7 Certified Developer
Associate Member, FileMaker Solutions Alliance

In article <11ruug0gl6kdp1d (AT) corp (DOT) supernews.com>,
howard (AT) antispahm (DOT) fmprosolutions.com says...
Quite!

An excellent source to draw from!

But don't stick with consistency at the expense of improvement. ie Let
your standard evolve. (between projects) And do what works best for you.

Definately read over the standards, and take what you like from them.
They might raise issues or ideas you haven't thought of, but while some
developers swear by a particular naming convention you'll never have to
look far to find someone who just swears at it.

I do want to weigh in with my own thoughts about field naming
conventions. I personally do NOT like them loaded with metadata. I
thought hungarian notation as adopted by Microsoft was an abomination;
and made code harder to read and maintain.

pronoun_This noun_Sentence verb_Is adverb_Needlessly adjective_Difficult
preposition_To verb_Read.

I'm gratified that its falling out of favour these days.

In filemaker, I focus primarily on sort order:

The normalized data model at the top, followed by derivative fields
(calculations), followed by utility at the bottom. And 'grouped'
logically within those segments.

e.g. I'd want first name and last name next to eachother, so i would
call them nameFirst, nameLast instead of firstName, lastName.

To acheive the broader grouping, I use the 'zz' tricks to move utility
crap off to the bottom. I used to use, and much prefered leading
underscores, but FM7/8 changed the sort order so those are now at the
front instead of the back

-regards,
Dave

Thanks for the pointer and the pointers.

I was actually changing field names in a db I created from FirstName
LastName to nameFirst nameLast when I started thinking about naming
standards that lead to my search and then this thread.

Cheers,
G