Field Mapping for FileMaker

Field Mapping: telling DayBack about your FileMaker tables

Configuring DayBack to show records from your FileMaker tables is done almost entirely by filling out a form in DayBack's source settings screen. Each table you map to will be shown as a separate " calendar" in DayBack and you can elect for some or all of these calendars to be showing at any given time.

DayBack is unique in letting you configure as many calendars as you want from as many tables as you'd like, allowing you to see them all at the same time alongside each other with your Google, Microsoft 365, and Basecamp calendar.

DayBack comes with two example tables already mapped for you. You can use these Events and To-Do calendars as examples to can see how these are mapped. Or simply use these tables as children of records you may already have. For example, if you have a jobs table but need to have multiple visits recorded against a job, DayBack's Sample Events table makes a great child-table for your job.

The Field Mapping form will describe the fields available in DayBack. Feel free to disable any fields you don't need or aren't sure about; if there is no "enabled" checkbox beside a field then it's required for the calendar to function.

If you're an administrator in DayBack, clicking on "Settings" in the calendar's left-hand sidebar will reveal an "Administrator Settings" button that will let you configure calendars.

Field mapping: getting started

Having already prepared your file and created your new calendar (steps 2 and 3 here), you'll continue editing the calendar settings by mapping the fields DayBack needs to know about in order to show your records on the calendar.

For each field, click "Details" to learn more about which FileMaker field DayBack expects. Most fields have a place for the field name in FileMaker and a place for the "Label" your users will see beside the field in DayBack. Let's look at the first few fields...

Event id - select the primary key field from this table (this field is required). Note that this field doesn't have a label value after it because this field isn't shown in DayBack's popover. But DayBack does need to know about it so that it can uniquely identify your records when you edit them.
Date start - this is the name of the field in FileMaker that contains your records start date. You'll see a list of date fields from your table. If your table has only one date field, like a due date, this is where you map it. Start is a required field, unlike "End".
Skipping down a few fields...
TimestampNumCalc Start - this is one of the required fields that you added to this table before getting started; if you did that correctly, this field is already filled out.
Label - This is the text you'd like to appear to the left of your start date/time in DayBack's popover. Enter somethnig like "Start". If your table is a To-Do list, you might enter "Due"; for a family tree, you might enter "Born".

Continue mapping your fields, assigning a field name and a label to each field you need to show, or disabling the if it doesn't apply to your object. (If you don't see an option for "unused" beside a field then that field is required.

Event display calc is the field that displays on the calendar before you've clicked on an event. You'll probably want this to be a calculated field and you can use the field "DBk_EventSummaryCalc" from DayBack's Sample Events table as an example. If you're adding icons or fancy styles to your event display, you'll likely do it in this calc. Learn more here: event styling.

Special field (status and resource)

The status and resource fields are a bit different in that the status field is used for color coding your item and the resource is used to assign it a column in the resource scheduling views.

Status

DayBack will color-code your events according to the value in this field. This is most often a temporal attribute of the event, like "has it been started" or "has the patient checked in yet." But it can also be what you use to tell one type of work from another: some users color code by department, or work type. For others, this is the payment status of a job: green for paid, orange for pending, grey for canceled.

To get started you can map Status to any field in your table, and then adjust the list of possible statuses in DayBack's filters tab to match the values you'd like to see for Status. More on this and on color-coding your items here: Events Colors & Status. Eventually, you may wish to pull the list of possible statuses from FileMaker and you can learn how to do that here.

Most often you'll want the status to be an editable field so that you can change the status right in the calendar. But you can map this to a calculation field as well, following the instructions here: using a calculated field for status or resource.

Resource

Resource scheduling is one of the real strengths of DayBack and you'll eventually want to read up on the available resource scheduling views here: Resources Overview. But for now, you can map the resource to any text field that depicts who's responsible for the event: a salesperson's name, the name of a conference room, etc. More on your options here: mapping the resource field.

Contacts and Projects

DayBack expects that your events are related to other tables in your FileMaker solution and provides contact and project hooks so that you can include those relationships in the calendar.

Note that when you rename the contact and project table occurrences in DayBack's file, you must use the same names as the table occurrences in the file where your events table lives.So if your "Contacts" table occurrence is named "Contacts_from_Appointments" in your file, you'll rename "SampleContacts_DayBack" to "Contacts_from_Appointments".

Check out how these fieds are mapped in the Sample Events table that comes with DayBack and read up on how to set this up here: contacts and projects.

But if you just want to see your calendar working, mark all four contact and project fields as disabled: you can always come back and set these up later.

Adding more fields to the calendar popover

You can go beyond the fields shown in DayBack's popover by adding additional fields; this great for including required fields you may need when creating new items. These are fields DayBack didn't think to create a space for and they'll appear on a drawer beside your event popover. These fields are exposed to DayBack's text filter and can be a great way to refine your calendar views with text filters saved as bookmarks.

Learn more about custom fields here: additional fields.