New in this prerelease of the 2.7 plugins:
- Added Files.FileSize function.
- Fixed crash on Windows with CURL options using lists.
- Added more parameter for Mac to Webview.LoadURL function.
- Changed CURL.SetUpdateProgressDialog to now also work for uploads.
Download at
monkeybreadsoftware.de/filemaker/files/Prerelease/
Today I created two shared folders on my dropbox account: MBS Real Studio Plugins and MBS Filemaker Plugins.
I'll put in the future new plugins there and if you like I can subscribe/invite you for this. And don't change the folders!
Dropbox is a nice way to sync files. Still I'd love to have a few advanced features. Like following a folder. So people can subscribe without asking me and see the folder with readonly access.
That would be nice to provide downloads in general, especially if the folder would be available over the web for public download.
Interested? Just drop me a line by email.
Drupa exposition is from 3rd to 16th May in Dusseldorf. I think about going there for a day as a visitor.
Would be nice to meet a few Real Studio developers there? Someone interested in a meeting?
One of my users asked what the difference between the plugin
CURL functions and the new insert from URL Script step is. Well, basically the
insert URL script step can do a specific thing which is getting data from an URL and putting it into a media field. If you just need this, you are fine, but if you need a little different feature, you should check our plugin. Like if you need some proxy settings or pass a cookie or some advanced credentials. Also if you use SSL, you should try the plugin as it can verify the peer using a certificate. Encrypting the data without making sure there is no attacker listening doesn't make much sense. Finally you may want to show progress while download and allow the user to cancel?
Our feature comparison:
|
Feature
|
Insert URL Script Step
|
MBS Filemaker Plugin
|
|
FTP and FTPS Protocols
|
Download
|
Download & Upload
|
|
HTTP and HTTP Protocols
|
Download
|
Download & Upload
|
|
File Protocol
|
Download
|
Download & Upload
|
|
Verify Certificate and Host for SSL connections
|
no
|
yes
|
|
Proxy Settings
|
no
|
yes
|
|
SFTP Protocol (File Transfer over SSH)
|
no
|
yes
|
|
FTP Directory Listings
|
yes
|
yes
|
|
Delete File
|
no
|
yes
|
|
Background transfers
|
no
|
yes
|
|
Cookie support
|
no
|
yes
|
|
Authentication (username/password for FTP/HTTP)
|
only within URL
|
yes
|
|
Reuse same connection
|
no
|
yes
|
|
Read/Write Data to file/variable
|
no
|
yes
|
|
Fill and send forms
|
no
|
yes
|
|
Use custom timeouts
|
no
|
yes
|
|
Follow redirects
|
no
|
yes
|
|
Speed limit / statistics
|
no
|
yes
|
|
Show progress and cancel download
|
no
|
yes
|
In our tests a ftp download using login/password worked with the insert URL script. Even ftp directory listings seem to work. Of course for advanced operations like renaming your file after upload or deleting a file, you need the plugin. Also if you want to follow redirects or you need to send special headers including cookie string.
Please don't hesitate to comment or inform us about things we forgot.
as you may have seen, we uploaded
Tree Size 3.1 and
Logintime in menubar 1.1. Both updated for being Intel Mac apps so they run on Snow Leopard and Lion. Also we added little improvements recently. In the Login time app you can click the time to switch between login time and duration.
As the Real Studio projects are included, you can learn from us on how to make such applications. You need Real Studio 2011r4 with current MBS plugins.
New in this prerelease of the 2.7 plugins:
- Improved hidden scrollbars on Mac for Filemaker 12 so they stay hidden even with resizing window.
- Added Window.ScrollbarsVisible function.
- Changed CURL debug output to no longer contain SSL raw data of transfer.
Download at
monkeybreadsoftware.de/filemaker/files/Prerelease/
We started a new
reviews page:
Review from John DeMillion
Christian,
Based on our experiences so far, your MBS plugin for FileMaker is head and shoulders above the other web/URL plugins we've used. We've found the other web plugins extremely time-consuming to use, and they seem to fail on complex sites with lots of cookies and sessions and such to track, even when we took the time to carefully reverse-engineer everything that the site was trying to do. In our current project, while we previously had things working well with another plugin, the website suddenly changed to a more complex model and we tried for many hours to get it working again, without success.
But with the MBS plugin's "WebView" components, we got our solution up and running again in less than a day. The MBS WebView model is absolutely brilliant: let FileMaker's WebViewer object do the heavy background lifting with cookies and sessions, etc, and just concentrate on controlling the WebViewer with the input that a user would normally give to a browser. The result was that it took us significantly less time to code this solution than with the previous plugins that we've used, and the resulting scripts are far more straightforward.
Thank you for the MBS FileMaker plugin and also for your super-quick work on the custom function that we needed; if not for MBS, we'd still be beating our heads on a brick wall trying to get our solution working.
John DeMillion Chester County Intermediate Unit United States
Review from Steve Thomas
the web viewer in filemaker has a great deal of power. Unfortunately, it was not given a voice of its own when the folks at filemaker built and brought it to life. The conversational one sidedness can make things a bit lonely. It turns out that there is a voice in the webviewer. in fact, there's a LOUD voice. Monkeybread's mbs plug in for filemaker is all that is needed to turn it on. Just be warned...uv been throwing rocks into a giant pool of calm water for some time. That calm water may just start throwing rocks at you. TheShortVersion: once u go from being limited to the oneway pushing of filemaker data > webviewer and living with mere "data display", to real 2way communication the likes of what can be accomplished when u can fire scripting from elements inside the web viewer, ur solutions will transform.
- steve thomas
Review from Simon Gerads
The MBS FileMaker Plug-in is a must have for all FileMaker developers. It is a Plug-in with many different solutions and each one of them works great. The power of all functions is amazing and the support is by far the best I have ever had. A question is answered in less the 24 hours and if thats not good enough. A sample is created by Christian to demonstrated the function.
I use the MBS FileMaker Plug-In almost everyday and the great thing is - it just works.
Keep up the great work and all the good ideas. Thanks a lot for your amazing Plug-In is by far the best.
- Simon Gerads
- Our filemaker documentation moved to new domain mbsplugins.eu which makes it possible that you can google for it in a few weeks (once it's indexed) and use "site:mbsplugins.eu" to search only the documentation. (like we have for Real Studio)
- For this blog, we added a side bar for latest comments. I hope it's useful and you leave a comment from time to time...
- The Real Studio meeting in London was great. Accounting is done and everything is paid. For your information: The event costed a little over 3000 Euro with a result of 500 Euro deficit which is our sponsoring subvention.
- The Filemaker meeting yesterday in Bern was great. A nice round table, 6 people in total and I showed a few of my plugin features.
- Did someone try the new VLC plugin for Real Studio? I got no feedback so far!
New in this prerelease of the 2.7 plugins:
- Added Window.GetAlpha.
- Fixed bug from pr4 with Javascript callback.
Download at
monkeybreadsoftware.de/filemaker/files/Prerelease/
New in this prerelease of the 2.7 plugins:
- Added Encryption.DecryptBlowfish and Encryption.EncryptBlowfish.
- Added Encryption.DecryptAES and Encryption.EncryptAES.
- Fixed Window.HideScrollbar function for Filemaker 12 on Mac and Windows.
- Added Hash.MD5 and Hash.SHA512 functions to get hashes of UTF-8 text.
Download at
monkeybreadsoftware.de/filemaker/files/Prerelease/
Just a quick note that we added SHA-512 cross platform for our
Real Studio Plugin.
Also we added MD5 and SHA-512 functions for our
Filemaker plugin, today.
New in this prerelease of the 2.7 plugins:
- Added WebPolicyDelegate functions to decide which files should be downloaded.
- Added WebDownloadDelegate functions so you can get downloads from WebViewer on Mac.
Download at
monkeybreadsoftware.de/filemaker/files/Prerelease/
Michael visited the easter bunnies while we were shopping for a little present for mum:
Wir wünschen frohe Ostern
Happy Easter - Buona Pasqua - Feliz Pascua - Joyeuses Pâques
This morning Filemaker 12 was released. A little surprise. Didn't expect it by now. But well, the plugin seems to work fine. This new version adds better Drag & Drop on Mac, so you won't need our plugin for accepting file drops on a media field. But still you can use our plugins if you want to accept drops with emails, text, url or image data. All the things that are not files.
On the server, they move to 64 bit and we'll have to rework the plugin to support that new 64 bit mode. I'll have to wait for details on this from Filemaker.
So far our WebViewer, Dialog, CURL, GraphicsMagick and other plugin functions seem to work just fine. I tested more than 50 examples so far.
What doesn't work, seems to be the function to hide scrollbars on a Filemaker window. But maybe with new functions of formatting windows, this is no longer needed?
If you see a problem with current plugins, please email us. We'll test more and probably make the 2.7 plugin release with all changes for Filemaker 12 ready in the next weeks.
New in this prerelease of the 2.7 plugins:
- Added FileDialog functions.
- Added Preferences.SetValue and Preferences.SetValue functions.
- Added Files.DirectoryExists, Files.FileExists and Files.ItemExists functions.
- Added PDFKit.Watermark function.
- Fixed GraphicsMagick functions to no longer crash if you call them with Destroyed image reference.
- Improved Drag and Drop. You can now specify email and receive email drags from Apple Mail.
- Added CoreLocation functions to query location of a Mac.
- Implemented Path.NativePathToFilemakerPath and Path.FilemakerPathToNativePath for Windows.
Download at
monkeybreadsoftware.de/filemaker/files/Prerelease/
in
Koblenz / Germany: 5th April 2012 in
Weinhaus Hubertus
in
Bern / Swiss: 12th April 2012 in
Beaulieu. see also
website
See you there!
