The Importance of Naming Conventions

Since 1999 CoreSolutions has published FileMaker Naming Standards. These standards are developed in an effort to share the efficiencies we’ve realized over the years by using a cohesive set of naming rules that make our systems recognizable by any of our developers, even in systems a decade old.

When FileMaker Inc. published their FileMaker Development Conventions white paper in 2005, CoreSolutions was part of the team of independent developers that made that happen. It was no small job to try to combine the skill, knowledge and habits of a dozen different developers into a single document that could be used by any developer to develop their own unique set of conventions. The thrust of that document is that whatever your naming conventions are, make them consistent and document them somewhere so that someone who is trying to follow your naming conventions has a document to refer to when attempting to understand them.

The developers on our FileMaker Team recently changed a few things in our naming standards to improve readability, reduce clutter, improve code portability, and make functionality more clear. Some revisions also reflect changes in the FileMaker platform that have affected how we develop new projects. I’m speaking both of the new FileMaker Go app for iOS devices and of the status toolbar which is now quickly becoming a developer’s friend rather than the first thing we hide when opening a new file.

If you’re interested in how we choose to name various FileMaker elements in our solutions, or are looking to adopt a set of naming conventions for your own use, feel free to download our latest version of the CoreSolutions FileMaker Naming Standards document and let us know what you think.