Articles, Tips, Techniques & Samples
FMT Member contributions including articles, tips, tricks & techniques. Please provide links to previously posted threads and demo or sample files.
563 topics in this forum
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MBS FileMaker Plugin videos on YouTube
by Monkeybreadsoftware- 1 follower
- 0 replies
- 68 views
Have you watched recent videos about MBS FileMaker Plugin on YouTube? MBS and FileMaker Custom Functions Run Via Plug-In MBS Plugin Talk - Christian Schmitz FileMaker and MBS Functions Spotlight FileMaker and MBS DynaPDF Functions Spotlight MBS FileMaker Plugin 2021 FMDiSC Meeting 3/12/2021 Monkeybread Plugin for FileMaker FileMaker Developers in Southern California MBS FileMaker Plugin 11.1 We k…
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Custom Functions stored in a database
by Monkeybreadsoftware- 1 follower
- 1 reply
- 139 views
Since we got this nice database for JavaScript to do custom functions (see blog article: Custom Functions in JavaScript), we further thought about doing this with FileMaker directly. Imaging to have your custom function in a central start database. Your solution opens, defines your own environment to store them and then loads all your custom functions from a table in the database. You may even have flags to define which are active vs. inactive, testing vs. production quality or maybe limited to admins. Once you have them loaded in memory, you can call them anywhere in any open file as long as FileMaker is running.Here is our example database:As you see we can define funct…
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Custom Functions in JavaScript with MBS Plugin
by Monkeybreadsoftware- 1 follower
- 1 reply
- 108 views
We saw a presentation at dotfmp conference from Philipp Puls about him storing his custom functions in a table inside the database. With help of one custom function in FileMaker itself, he can run them all. This dispatcher function would use execute SQL functions in MBS FileMaker Plugin to query the expression by name, then add the parameter inside and evaluate it. Quite convenient to have all custom functions stored in one database. Based on that idea we developed two new ways at MBS to do custom functions in JavaScript and later without.Custom Functions in JavaScriptSince MBS FileMaker Plugin comes with a built-in JavaScript engine, which works without web viewer and ev…
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Introducing Tesseract 4 to FileMaker
by Monkeybreadsoftware- 1 follower
- 1 reply
- 125 views
Years ago we added OCR functions to MBS FileMaker Plugin. We decided to go with the Tesseract engine, which was available as C++ library with an open source license. We integrated Tesseract in version 3.02 and stayed with that version for a long time. Since each version requires compatible data files, we could not easily change the library without you guys changing data files. That brings us to the version 4.11 of Tesseract. We had plans to use the new version and looked for a way to make the transition easy for our plugin users. But since the newer tesseract library exports a C interface, we can load it dynamically at runtime. This way we can give you a OCR.Load function…
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Using zbar library with FileMaker
by Monkeybreadsoftware- 1 follower
- 1 reply
- 86 views
You may know that our MBS FileMaker Plugin has functions for barcode generation and recognition. The Barcode.Detect function is based on the open source zxing library can recognize various types, but sadly not all QRCodes recently.To solve this we add support for the zbar open source library with our new Barcode.Scan function. Since the library is GPL, you have to include the library file with the application and load it at runtime with Barcode.LoadLibrary function. You may get a zbar library from the project website or from our Libs folder in download section. Our example project shows how to load the library at startup of application. On Linux you may just be able to in…
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Things you can do with DynaPDF
by Monkeybreadsoftware- 1 follower
- 0 replies
- 172 views
We like to show you what you can do with our DynaPDF features in our MBS FileMaker Plugin.Please see the topics below and take a look on the relevant example projects once you downloaded our plugin. Create New PDF from scratchStart a new blank PDF and add content to it. Just call DynaPDF.Append to add a new page and then while the page is open, draw some content on it. This may involve setting color with DynaPDF.SetFillColor or DynaPDF.SetStrokeColor functions and calling drawing functions like DynaPDF.MoveTo and DynaPDF.LineTo to draw a line. With DynaPDF.Rectangle, DynaPDF.DrawArc, DynaPDF.Bezier123 and our other drawing functions, you may build complex vector graphics.…
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FileMaker Server with Data API Plugins
by Monkeybreadsoftware- 1 follower
- 0 replies
- 67 views
With Claris FileMaker 19.3.1 you can install the MBS FileMaker Plugin 11.2 for the Data API process.To install our plugin manually, just copy the plugin to /FileMaker Server/Web Publishing/publishing-engine/wip/Plugins/ folder. Then check in Admin Console to make sure you have plugins enabled for the Data API. The Admin Console doesn't list plugins for Data API. If the plugin is not yet available, you may need to restart the wip process or the whole server to recognize the new plugin. The exact location is for macOS: For Windows: And for Ubuntu Linux: If you have no toggle for Data API plugins in your Admin Console, you may need to get a newer File…
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Convert HEIF images if needed
by Monkeybreadsoftware- 1 follower
- 0 replies
- 82 views
Recently a client contacted us for a problem they have. A solution hosted via FileMaker Server with Web Direct shows a layout with a container. Users can click on a button to upload an image, which uses Insert from Device script step. But if the user has an iPhone, the uploaded image may be an HEIF one. The High Efficiency Image File Format is great to preserve images in high quality, but other tools may not be able to read it. And we run into the problem, that the container is marked to be of type JPEG, which confuses other scripts (see Container.GetTypes function). Here is a script to look on the inserted image and convert it to PNG with our Container.ReadIm…
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MBS FileMaker Plugin, June 2021 News
by Monkeybreadsoftware- 1 follower
- 1 reply
- 128 views
For dotfmp 2021 we present what is new this year in MBS FileMaker Plugin: MBS FileMaker Plugin, June 2021 News (English) 36:32 minutes Watch on Youtube Subscribe to our podcast feed
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New Linux System Info in MBS Plugin
by Monkeybreadsoftware- 1 follower
- 0 replies
- 212 views
For our MBS FileMaker Plugin we have the first linux only function: SystemInfo.LinuxSystemInfo.This function provides some system information for Linux and returns it as a JSON block. You may query such a block regularly and do your own decisions based on the numbers, e.g. only do something on the server if load counts are small. Or you may check how much memory is available on the computer. Let's look in the values. First the UpTime value shows how long the server is running already, in our example 708 seconds, which is about 11 minutes. The loads array gives you the load averages for last 1, 5 and 15 minute. The load value is how many processes had to wait for a…
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- 1 follower
- 4 replies
- 110 views
I am aware that in some of the images in my container fields I have failed to check the box 'Store Only As A Reference' Is there a way to identify those particular records? Thanks in advance
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Combined Components with MBS FileMaker Plugin
by Monkeybreadsoftware- 1 follower
- 0 replies
- 362 views
When using MBS FileMaker Plugin, you may need to combine a lot of functions together to get some work done. That makes our toolbox of functions so flexible to use for your needs. Let us show you four examples: Regularly import files from hot folder First you start with Schedule functions to run a script regularly every few minutes in FileMaker Pro. Independent of SetTimer script step, so you can have multiple of them. You look into a file path with Files.List to get a list of file names in the folder. By using our List functions you compare the current file list to the one from last run. For example List.And would find similar files in both files, wh…
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Seven things to add to your FileMaker solution today with MBS Plugin
by Monkeybreadsoftware- 1 follower
- 0 replies
- 355 views
Let us show you a few things to use in MBS FileMaker Plugin and add to your solutions quickly today. Give your users a few new possibilities. From easy to complex, you may be able to copy a few scripts and adjust them to your field and layout names and get instantly new functionality for your solution. Let us show you a few things related to container fields in your solution:Continuity CameraIf you have containers fields on a layout for images or PDF containers, how about adding a little button next to the field to let the user take a picture with their iOS device and insert it to the container?The button may be hidden, if it's not FileMaker Pro on a Mac. But when clicked…
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Watching for Errors with MBS Plugin
by Monkeybreadsoftware- 1 follower
- 0 replies
- 254 views
When you use our MBS FileMaker Plugin, you will make a lot of calls to the plugin. Most will succeed, but some will fail. Do you notice when something fails? IsError function We see a lot of clients coding without checking for error state. But not all function calls succeed and our MBS FileMaker Plugin keeps a last error state for you. Even on server with multiple scripts running in parallel, we keep an error state per script. You can query it with MBS("IsError") to see if the last function call returned an error. You may do an error check each time you call a function with an If script step and handle the script. You may even write a log entry in a text fi…
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MBS FileMaker Plugin 11.1
by Monkeybreadsoftware- 1 follower
- 0 replies
- 427 views
In this article I want to introduce you the new functions from the MBS FileMaker Plugin in version 11.1.ArchiveWith the new Archive.CompressContainer function you can compress the content of a container into an archive. In the parameters you can specify in which format your archive should be. The following formats are available for this purpose: 7zip, ar, arbsd, argnu, arsvr4, bsdtar, cd9660, cpio, gnutar, iso, iso9660, mtree, mtree-classic, newc, odc, oldtar, pax, paxr, posix, raw, rpax, shar, shardump, ustar, v7tar, v7, warc, xar and zip. Then you can additionally specify a filter at e.g. for zip format it can be store or deflate. We also need to specify the destination…
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Video about MBS FileMaker Plugins 11.1
by Monkeybreadsoftware- 1 follower
- 0 replies
- 234 views
Let us show you a few of the new features in the version 11.1 of our MBS FileMaker Plugin: MBS FileMaker Plugins 11.1 (English) 17:23 minutes Watch on Youtube Some links for the video: 00:15 Installation 00:50 Preferences dialog 01:30 RegEx.DataDetector 02:30 QuickLook functions with new Markup 06:00 EPC Barcode project and Barcode functions 07:20 Enhancements for Calculation Dialog 09:00 Enhancements for Custom Functions Editor 12:15 Enhancements for Debugger Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have questions.
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LibXL for FileMaker with extras
by Monkeybreadsoftware- 1 follower
- 0 replies
- 341 views
For a few years we have worked on integrating the LibXL library and making functionality available for FileMaker. Beside all the standard built-in features from LibXL to read/write Excel files, we have some extra functionality developed ourselves:Copy CellsLibXL comes with a copy cell command, see XL.Sheet.CopyCell. Beside that we added XL.CopyRow to copy content of a row. Similarly XL.CopyColumn copies a column. As you can pass different book reference numbers, you may even copy from one document to another one or copy from one sheet to another sheet within the same document. The XL.CopySheet function can copy the content of a sheet to another document, great if you like…
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MBS Plugin extensions for Calculation Dialogs
by Monkeybreadsoftware- 1 follower
- 0 replies
- 329 views
You may have seen the earlier blog post about Custom Function Tools for FileMaker Pro. Once we showed this to people, we got a few ideas and one request was to include those buttons for the calculation dialogs in FileMaker in various places:As you see we added a white box for the result and put a place holder text inside. And we had to do code to dynamically look for what controls FileMaker places there and measure their size to place our box between controls on the left and controls on the right. Let us know if we got it wrong in your FileMaker version or language.Check 11.1pr4 to try this feature. Looks like the features work even in lots of older FileMaker versions dow…
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Markup for FileMaker on iOS
by Monkeybreadsoftware- 1 follower
- 0 replies
- 418 views
Did you know that iOS 11 introduced a feature to markup images and PDF documents right into the iOS system software?A client asked for adding annotations to a PDF right on the iPhone or iPad with their custom FileMaker iOS SDK based application. We through first to use our PDFKit or DynaPDF functions. Those can do things like merge or render PDF documents. And DynaPDF has quite a few functions to create annotations via script. Great if you automatically want to do things, like adding clickable links via script. (see older blog posts). But this is all via script and the user wants to annotate manually with his finger (or a pencil). Recreating all the markup tools with nati…
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Enable HiDPI aware web viewer for FileMaker
by Monkeybreadsoftware- 1 follower
- 0 replies
- 309 views
With latest pre-release we added the WebView.SetInternetExplorerHiDPI function to switch on the HiDPI aware more for FileMaker application (or runtime). See comparison picture:In your start script you can just call this function once to enable it:MBS( "WebView.SetInternetExplorerHiDPI"; 1 )When this option is active before web viewer is created, the web control will display the content high-dpi aware and zoom to 100% independent of the DPI of the display. In earlier blog post we recommended to use JavaScript to zoom the website:MBS( "WebView.RunJavaScript"; "web"; "document.body.style.zoom = \"200%\"; ")But this is no longer needed on Windows once the web viewer zooms cor…
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Tooltips for Script Debugger in FileMaker
by Monkeybreadsoftware- 1 follower
- 1 reply
- 324 views
When using other development tools, we frequently have a feature to inspect values for variables or fields. Just move the mouse over the variable or field and see what's inside. This is very convenient for debugging a script to quickly see values, especially if all the local variables and object properties don't fit a single variable viewer window.We got an idea for FileMaker. The macOS NSView class allows an application developer to register a function to provide a tooltip on demand. Instead of filling tooltips earlier, you can later decide on the value and generate it on the fly. To implement tooltips, we register for providing tooltips. When you move mouse over the tex…
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Data Detectors for FileMaker
by Monkeybreadsoftware- 1 follower
- 0 replies
- 321 views
You may have seen Safari, Mail, Notes or other applications highlighting information in some text and they may offer to do something with the data, e.g. take a date and make a new event in your calendar or take an address and add it to your contacts.Have you wondered how this works? Apple provides data detectors in their frameworks to identify those data bits. We just added a new function RegEx.DataDetector to use those in FileMaker. While you can do a lot with regular expressions yourself, these pre-built detectors are convenient to use as they are. Here is our new function:MBS( "RegEx.DataDetector"; CheckingType; Text ) You tell what to look for, either Date, Address, …
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Custom Function Tools for FileMaker Pro
by Monkeybreadsoftware- 1 follower
- 1 reply
- 378 views
Recently we noticed a new idea on the FileMaker Community, a wish to extend the custom functions dialog with some useful capabilities to execute a custom function or check the syntax. And that's what wish was my puzzle for the weekend to solve. I remembered we had something like this in FileMaker as database: Formatting and error checking expressions in FileMaker, where you can enter a formula, format syntax and check for errors. Let's put that from a script to C++ and do it within the plugin:As you see we got two new buttons for the custom script editor dialog in FileMaker Pro. When you click Check Syntax, we take your expression and build a test expression around it. We…
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Generate EPC-QR-Code in FileMaker
by Monkeybreadsoftware- 1 follower
- 0 replies
- 427 views
One of our clients asked for how to create payment QR-Codes in FileMaker and we just made him a new example for this. You may prepare the data, but then you can use MBS Plugin to create the barcode and put it as picture in a container and print it on your invoice. Or you use DynaPDF to draw it as vector graphics to keep it sharp. Here is the main script with the full calculation to assemble the text for the barcode: # EPC-QR-Code generation # Go to Layout [ “Tabelle” ; Animation: None ] # Sample data for QR-Code. May need adjustment to final standard Set Variable [ $text ; Value: // Service Tag "BCD" & ¶ & // V…
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New in MBS FileMaker Plugin 11.0
by Monkeybreadsoftware- 1 follower
- 0 replies
- 269 views
In this article I want to introduce you the new functions from the MBS FileMaker Plugin in version 11.0.Drag & DropLet's start with the functions that are new in the DragDrop component. You can now create a drag drop area over the whole working window. The DragDrop.AttachToWindow function disables FileMaker's drop handler and installs the plugin one to the window.You can also drag things out of a drop zone. To do this, you can use DragDrop.SetFilePathsToDrag to specify a list of paths to where the files should be taken. With DragDrop.SetDragImage you can set an image that should be displayed when this object is dragged. If we do not set an image, we have a preview ima…
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Configure WebViewer preferences via MBS Plugin
by Monkeybreadsoftware- 1 follower
- 0 replies
- 296 views
Did you know you can configure the capabilities of the WebViewer in FileMaker using MBS FileMaker Plugin functions?If you take a close look on the WebView.SetPreferences function for MacOS and iOS, you find a couple of options to set. Let's take a look on the most important options and what each option sets:minimumFontSizeYou may load some HTML into the web viewer, like the content of an email. Since you don't know the font sizes, you can define a minimum font size for the content. For example use 12 point for fonts as minimum:Set Variable [$r; Value: MBS("WebView.SetPreferences"; "web"; "minimumFontSize"; 12) ]javaScriptEnabledIf you show an email, it may be a good idea …
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DynaPDF Optimize command
by Monkeybreadsoftware- 1 follower
- 1 reply
- 457 views
As you may know we have a great Optimize command for DynaPDF. You can use it on PDF documents in both FileMaker and Xojo plugins. Over time the command got more and more powerful and we like to write here about some of the features. In general the function rebuilds the content stream of all pages, templates, patterns, annotations, and form fields. This may remove errors in the content stream and produce a consistent document. When you specify the flags, the default flag value (0) just rebuilds the content stream and fixes errors. You may specify "InMemory" to have changes made in a way, that the PDF is in memory and not flushed to the current output. Normally y…
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Convert PDF text to outlines with MBS Plugin
by Monkeybreadsoftware- 1 follower
- 1 reply
- 356 views
A long term project came to delivery just before Christmas 2020: DynaPDF got a new feature to convert texts to outlines. And it's just a new flag for the Optimize function: ConvTextToOutlines. The benefit of this conversion is that you can send the PDF to a printer shop and be sure that it will look exactly as you need. No font trouble, no missing fonts and no font rendering issues. Please note that the process is not reversible. Once the text is converted, the text is gone. Just the look of the text stays, so you need OCR to convert it back to text. Copy & Paste is not possible for outlines, but for some uses this may be desired. To show you what…
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Multi Column Output for PDFs with FileMaker
by Monkeybreadsoftware- 1 follower
- 1 reply
- 363 views
For MBS FileMaker Plugin we recently added a new DynaPDF.SetPageBreakExpression function. Have you seen it? It allows you to define a page break expression. This calculation is evaluated when a text rectangle is filled with text and we need a new page or a new rectangle on the same page. Look on this sample database with three columns filled over many pages with one big text block:Here is a sample call for DynaPDF.SetPageBreakExpression: As you see this calculation gets called when the text rectangle is filled. It uses a Let statement to compound multiple statements and first increases the CurrentColumn variable. If we have room left, we define a new rectangle fo…
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Save PDF to container in FileMaker
by Monkeybreadsoftware- 1 follower
- 0 replies
- 572 views
You may know FileMaker has the possibility to save records as PDF to a file. From time to time clients ask how to script to get the PDF into a record. We like to show you a sample script on what you can do and run this either on server (e.g. triggered from FileMaker Go) or on client. The script takes the record ID as parameter. We switche to the target layout and the correct record based on the record ID to setup the context. That's important as on a server we need to setup context ourselves. On a client you can skip this, if you know you are on the right record already. We build a file path for the temporary PDF document named "temp.pdf". On a server with multiple …
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