Currently I know those six conferences:
- .fmp[x]Berlin, 2nd to 4th June in Berlin, see dotfmp.com/tiki-index.php
- FM Summit, 9th and 10th October in Den Haag, see fmsummit.info
- FileMaker Developer Conference, 28th to 31st July in San Antonio, see filemaker.com/developers/devcon/
- FM Devcon, 14th to 16th October in Bolonga, see fmdevcon.com
- FileMaker Konferenz, 16th to 18th October in Winterthur, see filemaker-konferenz.com
- fm conférence, 23rd to 25th October in Toulouse, see fmconf.com
Do you know more this year?
New in this prerelease of the 4.2 plugins:
- Added Files.DeleteFolder function.
- Updated DynaPDF library to version 3.0.33.92.
- Added more DynaPDF functions.
Download at
monkeybreadsoftware.de/filemaker/files/Prerelease/ or ask for being added to the dropbox shared folder.
The voting is done and we have final results:
Wednesday, 11th June,
Xojo Developer Meeting
Thursday, 12th June,
FileMaker Developer Meeting
Please save the date and we'll look for a room.
If you are interested in joining, please email me, so we know how many seats we need.
Meeting will be probably in a beer garden or restaurant somewhere near Vienna.
If you plan to go, please use the early bird pricing to save $300.
MBS will be at the conference with a booth as well as 1000+ attendees.
New in this prerelease of the 4.2 plugins:
- Added Background parameter for PDFKit.Watermark function.
- Fixed PDFKit.Watermark function to use correct page size.
- Added more DynaPDF functions.
Download at
monkeybreadsoftware.de/filemaker/files/Prerelease/ or ask for being added to the dropbox shared folder.
Today a FileMaker developer asked if we can use the tiny URL web service functions to create short URLs from FileMaker.
The answer is yes, we can. Here a sneak peak on the script. The example database will be included with next plugins:
The API is explained
here and you can sign up for a developer key
here.
The script itself is not that difficult. First we start a new CURL transfer and set a lot of options. This includes setting up a form with the various parameters for the service. Than we perform transfer and show debug and result texts in some fields for debugging. Once we closed transfer, we can parse the result json and get the state and the url. If state is not okay, we show dialog with error, else we got our short URL.
PS: This would work similar from Xojo, too.
In June, I travel to vienna and I think this is great opportunity to have some parties.
So I plan to organize a FileMaker and a Xojo developer meeting.
I started two surveys to find the best days in the week:
Xojo Developer Meeting FileMaker Developer Meeting
If you like, please vote for a day if you like to come.
New in this prerelease of the 4.2 plugins:
- Added Twain.IsInitialized, OCR.IsInitialized, DynaPDF.IsInitialized and XL.IsInitialized.
- Fixed DynaPDF.RenderPage to pass right file name with image.
- Added more checks to avoid the plugin to return too big data in container.
- Added DynaPDF.GetCharacterSpacing and DynaPDF.SetCharacterSpacing.
- Updated DynaPDF library to version 3.0.33.91.
- Added field Platform for Audit, so you can record where log was written.
- For missing variables, we now explicit show message after line with text like this: $r not found!
Download at
monkeybreadsoftware.de/filemaker/files/Prerelease/ or ask for being added to the dropbox shared folder.
Recently in our FileMaker training day there was an interesting question. If we trigger the plugin function through a script on a server, would that perform the Audit calculations on server? Running it on server would avoid a lot of remote SQL queries and be much better for performance.
So if you like to host database on server and have Audit log being updated from all devices, you can do this steps:
First you create the AuditLog table like usually. You add text fields for FieldName, FieldHash, RecordID, TableName and FieldValue. If you like add more like HostName, FieldOfdValue, Platform, UserName, LayoutName or something from the list in documentation. This table must be in same database.
Next you create two scripts per table to watch. First script calls second script with "Perform Script on Server" script step. This script does not need to wait for the other script to finish.
The second script performs the actual Audit call. For this you only need a script step "Set Variable" with the audit calculation: MBS( "
Audit.Changed"; Get(CurrentHostTimestamp); "Projects"). Projects is here the name of the table. You can of course include or exclude fields like normal audit handling. If you like, you can pass some extra details using script parameter and use them in this script to log extra information. For that you can for example pass an extra parameter with "Info|" & Get ( ScriptParameter ) to fill the parameter's value into a field named Info.
To actually get something running, you now define for each layout a trigger which calls the first script. So for the trigger OnRecordCommit you choose the script and FileMaker calls the script. The script than performs the other script on server which does the Audit operation. Performance is great here, even from iPad with FileMaker Go 13. If you like you can also have the script perform when user moves to layout or leaves layout.
Please try it. If it works for you, you should see new audit logs being written from FileMaker Pro, Filemaker Go and WebDirect. In the sample project we log in Info field the answer from
Get(SystemPlatform), so we record 4 for web direct, 3 for FileMaker Go and 1 for FileMaker Pro on Mac.
There are differences when doing audit on server. Platform on the server is always ServerScripting. The hostname is of course the name of the server. The user name contains the name of script, the login name and and ID. The host IP and time stamps are of course those from the server, not the client.
A new example project and newer plugin is available tomorrow with the next prerelease.
For next FileMaker plugin we now added a little text to the script when we detect an unknown variable:
Without plugin, it just looks like this:
To activate the variable name checks for scripts, you need to first have a Mac, second install the plugin and third execute MBS( "
SyntaxColoring.CheckVariableDeclaration.Enable" ) once.
We hope it helps debugging scripts if you see that you have typos in variable names for local variables.
New in this prerelease of the 4.2 plugins:
- Updated DynaPDF library to version 3.0.33.90.
- Changed FM.ExecuteSQLOnIdle to set FM.ExecuteSQL.LastError to -1 until the SQL was performed.
- Updated default rule set for syntax coloring. Now includes french. Use SyntaxColoring.FactoryDefaults function if you like to reset.
- Added Midi functions.
- Fixed a problem with TWAIN plugin crashing on HP scanner (especially with a Deskjet 2540 where it now works).
- Added Window.GetTopMost and Window.SetTopMost.
- Added wrap parameter to String.ReplaceNewline function.
- Added DynaPDF.AddValToChoiceField, DynaPDF.CreateGroupField, DynaPDF.GetBorderStyle, DynaPDF.SetBorderStyle, DynaPDF.CreateComboBox, DynaPDF.CreateCreateListBox, DynaPDF.CreateSigField, DynaPDF.CreateSigFieldAP and DynaPDF.CreateRadioButton.
- Added Process.FrontProcessBundleID function.
- Changed how function return numbers. Integers are returned as 32bit signed integer if fit, else as double.
Download at
monkeybreadsoftware.de/filemaker/files/Prerelease/ or ask for being added to the dropbox shared folder.
Recently Todd Geist reported on his
blog that FileMaker has a native MD5 calculation function using:
GetContainerAttribute( "FileMaker 13" ; "MD5" )
Text encoding used seems to be UTF-8, but I don't think FMI specifies that.
If you need more hash functions or options, you can of course check our
plugin hash functions.
We have for some time now support for the
Dash application as a help browser.
And there is also available for Windows and Linux here:
Zeal
So here you can click to launch Dash or Zeal and install our plugin help:
MBS Xojo Plugin and
MBS FileMaker Plugin
You like to talk directly with us about MBS Plugins?
On the following events you can learn more about our plugins:
- 8th May 2014, MBS Xojo Workshop @denkform in Hofheim (Taunus)
- 8th May 2014, local FileMaker meeting in Lorsbach (near Frankfurt/Main, Germany)
- 3rd July 2014, local FileMaker meeting in Hamburg, Germany
- 28th July 2014, FileMaker DevCon 2014, San Antonio, USA
- 16th October 2014, FileMaker Conference, Winterthur, Swiss
