If you’re going to be developing a FileMaker database on FileMaker Server 11, there is an important behavior that you should be aware of.

While working on a project hosted on FileMaker Server, I came across an issue with some of the navigation scripts. At first I thought that the issue was due to permissions not allowing me to access certain parts of the system, but after some script debugging I learned that the navigation script itself was failing because a global calculation was not evaluating properly. This discovery lead to some confusion as each table in our system has one such field used specifically for navigation purposes, and only some of them were giving me a value. Creating a record in the offending table seemed to solve the problem, but only temporarily. It turns out that global fields in tables created while the database is hosted on FileMaker Server do not get saved when the client disconnects from the server the way that a global field is saved when a local database is closed. The solution to the problem is to close the database on the server, open it locally and create a record in each table so that each global field receives a value. Once the database is closed again it will save that value. From then on the global field will start with a value whenever you log into the system, even when hosted on FileMaker server.

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