Articles, Tips, Techniques & Samples
FMT Member contributions including articles, tips, tricks & techniques. Please provide links to previously posted threads and demo or sample files.
554 topics in this forum
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New Linux System Info in MBS Plugin
by Monkeybreadsoftware- 1 follower
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- 22 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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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
- 204 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
- 204 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
- 220 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
- 254 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
- 217 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
- 273 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
- 316 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
- 321 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
- 299 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
- 310 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
- 308 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
- 311 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
- 326 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 [ $text ; Value: // Service Tag "BCD" & ¶ & // V…
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New in MBS FileMaker Plugin 11.0
by Monkeybreadsoftware- 1 follower
- 0 replies
- 255 views
In this article I want to introduce you the new functions from the MBS FileMaker Plugin in version 11.0.Drag & DropLet's start with the functions that are new in the DragDrop component. You can now create a drag drop area over the whole working window. The DragDrop.AttachToWindow function disables FileMaker's drop handler and installs the plugin one to the window.You can also drag things out of a drop zone. To do this, you can use DragDrop.SetFilePathsToDrag to specify a list of paths to where the files should be taken. With DragDrop.SetDragImage you can set an image that should be displayed when this object is dragged. If we do not set an image, we have a preview ima…
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Configure WebViewer preferences via MBS Plugin
by Monkeybreadsoftware- 1 follower
- 0 replies
- 247 views
Did you know you can configure the capabilities of the WebViewer in FileMaker using MBS FileMaker Plugin functions?If you take a close look on the WebView.SetPreferences function for MacOS and iOS, you find a couple of options to set. Let's take a look on the most important options and what each option sets:minimumFontSizeYou may load some HTML into the web viewer, like the content of an email. Since you don't know the font sizes, you can define a minimum font size for the content. For example use 12 point for fonts as minimum:Set Variable [$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
- 308 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
- 320 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
- 333 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
- 426 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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New in MBS FileMaker Plugin 10.5
by Monkeybreadsoftware- 1 follower
- 0 replies
- 379 views
In this article I want to introduce you the new functions from the MBS FileMaker Plugin in version 10.5. XL - Working with Excel Let's start with the innovations in the XL topic. With our plugin you can create and edit Excel documents via FileMaker scripts. Also in this release we have new features that extend the functionality of this topic. With the new function XL.CopyColumn you can copy the values of a column of a table into another column. This copying process is not limited to the worksheet or book. You can also copy columns between different books and sheets. These must then be defined in the parameters. You can use the XL.Sheet.AddDataValidation fun…
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DynaPDF WriteFText with links inside
by Monkeybreadsoftware- 1 follower
- 0 replies
- 388 views
For the MBS FileMaker Plugin in version 10.5pr3 we include the new DynaPDF library in version 4.0.43.121. The WriteFText function can now create links within the text: to a web site to a named destination within the same PDF. to a named destination within another PDF document You include \LK[] command in the text as command in your text and then specify the website. Within the brackets you specify 4 to 5 parameters: IsNamedDest (false or 0, true or 1) IsExternalLink (false or 0, true or 1) OpenInNewWindow (false or 0, true or 1) URL or name of a named destination (see DynaPDF.CreateNamedDest()) PDF file in which the nam…
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Toolbar Security in FileMaker
by Monkeybreadsoftware- 1 follower
- 0 replies
- 363 views
Everyone developing a FileMaker solution for macOS should get the MBS FileMaker Plugin and configure the toolbar contextual menu with our Window.ConfigureToolbarMenu function:As you see, you can configure the toolbar menu to remove the whole menu (mode 1) or hide only the entries to show/hide/configure.For mode 1 we skipped the screenshot as simply no menu shows up.If the user is allowed to configure the menu bar, he can enable commands you may have disabled via custom menus and work around your security concept. Like if you disable delete, import, export or print buttons and the user configures the toolbar to restore it.
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Embrace JSON
by Monkeybreadsoftware- 1 follower
- 0 replies
- 437 views
With the next MBS FileMaker Plugin release, we will embrace JSON functions for our FileMaker plugin. As more developers now learn JSON, we can now return you more data as JSON. Instead of making dozens of calls to query all information about a field in a PDF document, you may just want to call DynaPDF.GetFieldsAsJSON and get details for all fields in one chunk and then pick what you need. On the way we made similar functions for annotations, bookmarks, color spaces, doc information, embedded files, fields, fonts and system font information: DynaPDF.GetAnnotationAsJSON DynaPDF.GetAnnotationsAsJSON DynaPDF.GetBookmarksAsJSON DynaPDF.…
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Playing with Machine Learning on Windows
by Monkeybreadsoftware- 1 follower
- 0 replies
- 285 views
We have started to look on the Windows Learning APIs to implement some functions for our plugins. Since 2017 we have CoreML functions for macOS. FileMaker 19 now ships similar functions built-in, but we think the plugin can still do more. As we are now using newer Visual Studio 2019, we can finally also check the Windows Learning functions: You can use ONNX Models with the classes, so check the Microsoft website on how to get models. This mainly points to the ONNX Model Zoo, which has some interesting models available. We started by porting the desktop SqueezeNetObjectDetection example from the Windows-Machine-Learning repository. You may want to download the Sq…
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Connect to Claris FileMaker Server from Xojo via Data API
by Monkeybreadsoftware- 1 follower
- 0 replies
- 271 views
With MBS Xojo Plugins 20.4 we include a new MBS Xojo FMAPI Plugin part with a few new classes to connect to a Claris FileMaker Server: class FMAdminMBS class FMDataMBS class FMConnectionMBS class FMDataSourceMBS class FMRequestMBS class FMResponseMBS class FMContainerUploadMBS The FMDataMBS class does a Data API connection while the FMAdminMBS class provides methods for the Admin API. Both have FMConnectionMBS as base class for the core functionality to connect. Connect Lets connect to a server via Data API using user name and password: // connect Dim connection As New FMDataMBS connection.Password =…
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Version Tracking in FileMaker with help of MBS Plugin
by Monkeybreadsoftware- 1 follower
- 0 replies
- 178 views
We show you our Split DDR example to prepare your DDR for better tracking changes in version control systems like GIT: Version Tracking in FileMaker with help of MBS Plugin The Split DDR example file is included with download of MBS FileMaker Plugin. All our FileMaker videos Watch on Youtube.
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Import images from cameras on MacOS with FileMaker
by Monkeybreadsoftware- 1 follower
- 0 replies
- 182 views
We got a few new ImageCapture functions to import images from camera on Mac. So if you can import in Photos.app or Image Capture.app, you can also import them in FileMaker. For version 10.4 of our MBS Plugin we got a new function ImageCapture.SetItemsAddedScript to define which script to trigger when a new picture is there. So you first use ImageCapture.OpenDevice to connect to camera, then use ImageCapture.RequestEnableTethering to ask for tethering, later call ImageCapture.RequestTakePicture to take a picture. Once the picture is taken, you get the script triggered and there you get a JSON like this: [ { "orientation" : 0, "parentFolder" : …
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Using TLS when connecting to MySQL server
by Monkeybreadsoftware- 1 follower
- 0 replies
- 62 views
If you like to connect to MySQL or MariaDB from FileMaker with MBS FileMaker Plugin, you can set SSL options to connect through an encrypted connection. The options are named SSL, but nowadays it's all TLS v1.2 or newer. Here is a sample script we build with a client to get this FileMaker solution to connect to a MySQL server to download data, e.g. from a web shop. # Query parameters for connection Set Variable [ $$SQL.DB ; Value: Test SSL::_DBName ] Set Variable [ $$SQL.Server ; Value: Test SSL::_Host ] Set Variable [ $$SQL.Account ; Value: Test SSL::_User ] Set Variable [ $$SQL.Pwd ; Value: Test SSL::_Passwort ] # …
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