Check out the FMTraining.tv website. Richard Carlton and his team do a daily free live stream about FileMaker to watch.
A few days ago Christian Schmitz from Monkeybread Software joined a live episode to talk a bit about the MBS FileMaker Plugin. Watch it on YouTube.
A question and answer round for the MBS FileMaker Plugin. We talk about automatically installing the plugin with scripts. The we check DynaPDF functions to merge PDFs and convert HEIF/HEIC images to add them to the PDF. We render PDF pages and generate barcodes. A PDF form gets build, filled with data and exported. The user updates data and we import the changes back to FileMaker. We check toolbar functions to customize the toolbar in the FileMaker window on macOS. Finally we check email related functions like the EMailParser functions.
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Recently we had the idea that we could draw charts ourselves with the GraphicsMagick functions. It's more a fun project, but I was able to draw a simple bar chart with a few drawing commands. We use a few filled rectangles to draw bars and calculate them on the fly in the while loop.
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In Filemaker you sometimes want to export text. For that people usually use the Export Field Contents script step in Filemaker. There you can specify a field and a filename. Filename can include variables and specify different paths on Mac and Windows. Field can be a field you select or the current field. If you export a container, you get the file written there (make sure you have right extension!) and for text it writes an UTF-16LE encoded text file.
Now sometimes you need more. Like you want to export values in a variable without putting them in a field. You may want to export text as UTF-8, MacRoman, Windows ANSI or some other text encoding instead of UTF-16LE. With
Text.WriteTextFile you can specify the text encoding you want. Maybe you want to pass text before through
Text.ReplaceNewLine to make sure the right newline character is used. For example CR for Classic Mac, CRLF for Windows or LF for Unix Mac OS X. Next you may want to write a log file and just append to a file with
Text.AppendTextFile.
For containers you can export them with
Container.Export. There you can specify a container as field or variable and a path to write to. And you select what to export. Like if your container contains a TIFF picture, you can either export the TIFF or the preview JPEG. The function
Container.GetTypes tells you which types are in a container.
If you like, please check
Container.Export,
Text.AppendTextFile,
Text.WriteTextFile or
Text.ReplaceNewline.
Sometimes you may have a project where you need to output bidirectional text. If you output any of the following languages, you may need to think about how to handle the right to left direction:
- Arabic
- Aramaic
- Azeri
- Dhivehi/Maldivian
- Hebrew
- Kurdish (Sorani)
- Persian/Farsi
- Urdu
When you use DynaPDF in FileMaker with MBS FileMaker Plugin, you can use the DynaPDF.SetBidiMode function to enable bidirectional mode and set it to RightToLeft layout. Of course you need to load a font with unicode code page to have it cover all the characters. The bidi algorithm makes sure you can mix left to right and right to left text within a text, but you still need to define whether the layout is left to right or right to left.
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New in this prerelease of version 15.3 of the
MBS FileMaker Plugin:
- Updated mongo-c-driver to version 1.30.5.
- Improved OCR error messages to state whether tesseract or leptonica library is not loaded.
- Added search: prefix for comment links to jump to whatever text you provide.
- Added SystemInfo.AppResourceUsageStatistics function.
- Improved how we scroll lists to make sure more rows below and after a visible.
- Improved debugger in FileMaker to scroll better and show a few rows adhead on stepping.
- Improved our CopyButton to not show the warning in console about adding a button to the title bar.
- Updated DynaPDF to version 4.0.102.290.
Download at
monkeybreadsoftware.com/filemaker/files/Prerelease/
You can subscribe to our FileMaker mailing list to get notified for new pre-release and release versions.
When you build a mail solution using our CURL functions in MBS FileMaker Plugin, you may use sample code to do an IMAP upload. Commonly you use this to upload an email to the Sent folder when you sent it via SMTP.
New in version 15.2 is the CURL.SetOptionUploadFlags function to pass the flags for uploads. In older CURL versions there was a default to set seen flag, but now you can and shouuld control it.
For example we can use this to set the seen flag for an email, when we upload it to the sent folder, so it doesn't appear as a new email. Or you can set the Flagged flag value to mark the email as flagged.
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New in this prerelease of version 15.3 of the
MBS FileMaker Plugin:
- Updated DynaPDF to version 4.0.102.288.
- Added DynaPDF.SetActiveSigField function.
- Added SystemInfo.isTahoe function.
- Fixed a problem in CompressFiles method for ZipMBS class, broken since 25.0.
- Improved SQL.InternalSQLiteLibrary.Dump function.
- Updated SQLite to version 3.50.1.
- Improved our CoreML functions to handle Int8 data type in addition to Float16, Float32, Int32 and Float64 data types that your models may use.
- Updated CURL library to version 8.14.1.
- Added CURL.SetOptionSSLSignatureAlgorithms function.
- Improved loading LDAP library on Linux to work on Ubuntu 22 and 24.
- Changed copy text/selection in ScriptWorkspace to indent the lines.
- Added SelectedOnly and EndOfLine parameters for ScriptWorkspace.StyledScriptText function.
Download at
monkeybreadsoftware.com/filemaker/files/Prerelease/
You can subscribe to our FileMaker mailing list to get notified for new pre-release and release versions.
Did you know that you can use JSON in our Saxon functions? Originally Saxon is a XML library, but it can take JSON as input in various queries. The queries internally work with maps and arrays and these can be filled by JSON.
Let us show you how to use JSON for Saxon.XPathQuery and Saxon.XQuery functions:
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For the next version of MBS FileMaker Plugin in 15.3 we add the Window.SetRoundCorners function to provide round corners.
At the recent Vienna Calling conference a developer asked if we can get the edges of the card in FileMaker to be round. And yes, that is indeed possible. Once the card is shown, the MBS Plugin can find the card window and apply round corners to it.
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New in this prerelease of version 15.3 of the
MBS FileMaker Plugin:
Download at
monkeybreadsoftware.com/filemaker/files/Prerelease/
You can subscribe to our FileMaker mailing list to get notified for new pre-release and release versions.
Did you notice that MBS FileMaker Plugin 15.2 includes a new feature to add keyboard shortcuts for the result data types for a formula?
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Did you know we can pass styled text to Apple Mail?
We can use our SharingService functions to share data with other applications. This includes passing styled text, containers with images, files or URLs.
Available services
Using the SharingService.ServicesForItems function, we can query the available services to request. This allows us to check which services are available and only show a button to share via Airdrop, if that is possible.
By default you have these services available on macOS:
| Title | Name | Text | File Path | Images | URLs |
|---|
| Add to Photos | com.apple.share.System.add-to-iphoto | - | X | X | - |
| Add to Reading List | com.apple.share.System.add-to-safari-reading-list | - | - | - | X |
| AirDrop | com.apple.share.AirDrop.send | - | X | X | X |
| Dropbox Transfer | com.getdropbox.dropbox.TransferExtension | - | X | X | - |
| Freeform | com.apple.freeform.sharingextension | X | X | X | X |
| Mail | com.apple.share.Mail.compose | X | X | X | X |
| Messages | com.apple.share.Messages.window | X | X | X | X |
| Notes | com.apple.Notes.SharingExtension | X | X | X | X |
| Reminders | com.apple.reminders.sharingextension | X | X | X | X |
| Simulator | com.apple.iphonesimulator.ShareExtension | - | X | X | X |
If you install applications, they may offer additional services. I got Dropbox to show up here, so I included it in the table.
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New in this prerelease of version 15.3 of the
MBS FileMaker Plugin:
Download at
monkeybreadsoftware.com/filemaker/files/Prerelease/
You can subscribe to our FileMaker mailing list to get notified for new pre-release and release versions.