One of the great things about FileMaker is it’s ability to quickly create a very useful solution quickly. Our local FileMaker Developer Group in the Twin Cities (FMPUG-MN) has monthly meetings. Recently, we’ve ordered sub sandwich box lunches from Jimmy John’s. With up to 30 people in attendance on a regular basis, it’s a challenge get the right orders quickly and accurately. Jimmy John’s has an online order app but it didn’t meet our needs as a group…so we built our own ordering app with FileMaker!
BoxLunchOrder takes the most popular box lunch options and allows you to pass around an iPad before the meeting so everyone can order exactly the box lunch they want. It summarizes the order and allows you to email it to the restaurant of your choice for delivery. You could easily modify it to do other things. That’s the power of FileMaker.
Download the FREE BoxLunchOrder solution for your iPad to play around with it. Get FileMaker Go for your iPad for FREE here.
We made the app able to take a credit card payment as well. Using the power of SquareUp.com or PayPal.com, you can set up an account to sell a product. Create a “Box Lunch” product for the amount you want contributed, then just insert the URL for that into the Prefs. Then each person can pay for their lunch individually without needing cash.
You can also download the app on your desktop workstation BoxLunchOrder and use FileMaker Pro to edit/change it to meet your needs. Get a FREE 30-day trial of FileMaker Pro here.
One of the bigger challenges was programming the summary email. Thanks to a custom function called SummarizeValues found here, it’s made the coding much more flexible and easy. If you’re into programming, feel free to poke around in the code and utilize the buttons and graphics, etc. in your own solutions.
Download the free example file here so you can incorporate it into your own FileMaker solutions. Enjoy!