VickyNesbitt

Does the hosting machine have a static IP address? If not it might not be the same every time it opens, hence that would explain why it only works sometimes...

Eureka! Ridiculously simple issue.... We all use networked accounts here - save and append PDFs to the network account and this error will pop up intermittently - I'm guessing because the server is busy backing up the newly created PDF at the same time that FileMaker is trying to append to it.... Or something like that anyway... Amended script to save everything to the temporary folder (which is local) using Get ( TemporaryPath ) - it works sweet as a nut every time! Thanks for your help everyone! Hurrah!!!!

Heya do you mean a separate "opener" or "starter" file that would live on your users desktop or wherever which does the Open Remote faff for you? If so... Opener file has one script which does the following; Open File ["Student Records"] Close File Change file options on this opener file so that it runs this script upon open. Next write a script in Student Records called Open/Start or whatever you fancy which goes to your layout. Then set this script to call upon open of the file... File Options in the File menu This way the opener file does its job, then gets out the way and then the open script will trigger on Student Records and navigate to your layout! Hope that helps!

Get (ActiveFieldName) will return the name of the currently active field. However - i agree with the previous two posts :)

Hi Dan Thanks for your response - I think in the past I had attempted to use container fields and images on IWP, but had issues so I discounted this straight away.... I can't remember specifically what my issues were last time, but clearly there's no issue here! Working great with containers and images now! Vicky

Hi Tom R Personally I would consider keeping all of the people records in the same table, differentiating different types of contacts with a Type field. Keeping them all in one place, gives you certain advantages e.g. if at some point you need to report or search through all of your contacts together then they are handily in once table ready for you... Then you just needs separate layouts to display different types of people showing the relevant fields for that type of user. Then I'd have employment as a separate table so that you can have employment records that start and end between 2 dates as related records. Vicky

Hey hey As doughemi said global fields are User and Session specific. I.e. the values hold for this user while they are logged into the system in the current session - when they log out all those values are cleared out (when accessed through FMS). I'm guessing the reason that you are still having problems, based on doughemi's advice, is that you are most likely still treating your fields like globals despite the fact that you have turned global storage off.... Your country field needs to be a non-global, there needs to be only 1 record in this table and to amend the value of the non global field you will need to navigate the user to the table in which it resides, whereas globals can be set from anywhere in the system. Hope this helps! Vicky

Hi All I've been building a database or my fellow developers and I to use to project manage our workload which is to be hosted via IWP so that users from different sites can easily access it. I wanted to make the system look fairly nice, but still be able to function over the web with as little modifications as possible. However I needed the database to be able to produce gantt charts... Bearing this in mind I basically created the gantt charts using repeating fields - each repetition represents a date and each record represents a different project. I tried to think of a good way to populate the repetitions of the repeating field - containers were out of the question and so is conditional formatting - so I decided to play around with fonts... I found that a "g" in webdings font created a solid square and I made the font big enough so each repetition would be totally "filled in" by the big black square! Hurrah, success.... NO! Foolishly I didn't test hosting my file via IWP at this point, I just though it would be sure to work... So now I go and host my file and all my "symbol" characters are showing as letters and not the special characters I was after... I tried changing to a different font ITC Zapf Dingbats and others but none of the symbol fonts appear to work :/ I have spent the whole first half a day searching online for something to give me an idea of how to resolve this to no avail. Does anyone know if there is a definitive list of supported fonts for IWP for FileMaker or is there something I need to do to "load" the fonts before I log into the system. Please help! All I want is a solid block I can fill a field with that will show on IWP as well as accessing from FileMaker Server and a tick if possible, however I can live without the tick! Thanks all in advance! Vicky x

David Jondreau Thanks for your response - correct - you cannot create a PDF with the same name as an open file. But my file IS NOT OPEN. I only open the file on the last save (append) which should not be a problem and in fact this works intermittently. My filename is valid - as mentioned previously this problem is intermittent on the same save - first PDF saves fine, first append fails with error 800 and the last PDF appends successfully. This is all using the same file path saved on the same variable at the beginning of the script. If I run the script slowly through debugger I generally get no errors at all pointing to the fact that FileMaker is still locked in the PDF from creation when it comes round to append to the same file... And yes the crashing I realise does point to corruption, however there's nowt I can really do about that apart from try to get my script to work using my workaround. I am in no position to rebuild the file and I know for a fact that in the past they have been recovered out of necessity and put back into production. ------------------ Any other ideas about the file locking and how to stop it?!? Or any way I can test to see if the file is locked?

My other sneaky workaround is out the window... Thought of this as I am required to generate the PDFs for 150 records in a batch so I've looped my original script for this purpose... If the error code was 800 I was going to enter a loop to basically continually attempt to append until the error is 0 then exit the loop, however error 800 is un-supressable so that's a no-go. Just sitting here OKing error messages as my script loops through now...

Yup using FileMaker Server... And I know it is a difficult statement to swallow as it doesn't really make sense... I had implemented the changes to the PDF - making it a list view of our edits table with the other related data showing in the header and footer. Then the server went down. Then we rehosted the files, it went down again, and again... There was one user waiting for the files to come back up, then running the PDF script - each time they did it they got the spinning wheel, then everyone else got the spinning wheel, then everyone was booted out and server went down...

brian rich Thanks for your post. I totally agree - I have no idea either... I've worked with appending PDFs before and not encountered this issue... Went back to this and tried adding a Refresh Window step, flushing external data, however I still experience the same problem intermittently. john renfrew You gave me the idea to use a command line PDF merger (indirectly ) and this worked beautifully till I explained to superiors that the command line utility would need to be installed on all machines and all new ones... They're not so keen on this one! So the next plan is to go down the road you recommended as we already have a number of FileMaker plugins which all need to be installed on users machines anyway and this doesn't add to the job! However I need to get my head round Groovy first... :)

bcooney Normally I would agree with you about not splitting this up - however I have tried this, using as you suggest only the fields I need - simple number and text fields only. However when I went to print/PDF after finding the records it took forever and a day to print/PDF and in most instances crashed the users FileMaker and also managed to taker the entire server down on 2 occasions... I'm pretty certain this shouldn't happen but it did! I tried re-creating this layout from every possible angle, but could not make it work "properly"... I know there's nothing at all wrong with the file paths - the append works fine if I run through the script in debugger, but normally fails at least on the first append as the PDF is still locked from creation... Sometimes it works with the 1 second pause, sometimes it doesn't... john renfrew I'm using fm11 - thanks for the idea. I'm going to go and have a stab at this now! You've also given me another idea... We are all on macs here in the office so I can run shell scripts via Applescripts - if I can find a free, simple to code command line tool to merge PDF's I can use this as another option and there might be less in the way of coding Thanks to you both!!!

Hi All We have a script in our system that generates a PDF which details records and their related details. Originally this PDF layout was contained within our globals table - it showed, via a relationship based on global fields, the record we want to look at (the version) plus the related lines in portals (the edits), however there was an issue with this... Sometimes the record we wanted to PDF had over 200 related edits and the portal option restricted us here to a fixed number of records. Also in order to take into consideration large amounts of text in the portal row we had to make the portal row so large that it looked a mess in most circumstances. So the idea was to amend the report so that it was based on our edits table, display it as a list and use the relationships to show the rest of the version information in the header/footer. This way we can account for an unlimited number of related edits and also use sliding and printing to resize the field size dependant on the amount of text. Problem here was.... there are some nasty, but necessary, unstored calcs in our edits table... When you went to print the report or save to PDF it started a never ending "find in progress" to the point that in the end our entire server crashed, kicking everyone out and rendering FileMaker unusable for a significant time... I'm pretty certain that this sort of activity should not really trigger this kind of reaction, but hey... My last resort was to split the PDF report into 3 layouts - header, body and footer. The header and footer based on the globals table and the body based on a new hold table containing a few text fields - I import the related edits into this table on the fly when the report is run. The script now does the following; 1. Goes to the header layout saves as pdf on users desktop 2. Goes to the body part, import the records for the report and append to the existing PDF 3. Finally goes to the footer part and appends the PDF to the end of the existing PDF and opens the PDF. Running this through debugger it works fine.... Run it normally and most of the time I get the "The file filenamehere.pdf could not be created on the system disk. Use a different name, make more room on the disk, unlock it or use a different disk" message at the stage of appending the second PDF, or sometime the last. I checked all of the other bits and pieces i.e. disk space, naming etc, however I couldn't find anything that could present this problem. So I decided that this was due to the file still being locked from the previous Save as PDF step... So I added a Pause Script step and paused the script for 1 minute before executing the second and third PDF append... However this has still not totally fixed the problem... Anyone know of a sure fire way to either determine how long to wait before touching the file again OR to manually unlock the file via some other kind of scripting i.e. applescript and shell???? HELP PLEASE THIS IS DRIVING ME NUTS!!!

Hi Kent There's a number of ways you can do this, here's 2; Write a script to import the relevant data from the quotation into the invoices table, so in your script you'd need to omit all other quotations records aside from the one you want to convert to an invoice (show all, omit record, show omitted will do this), go to the invoice table and perform an import script step matching the fields you want to pull across (once you're done make sure you switch the dialog off on the import as you don't want your users to see that bit). I'd also recommend creating a foreign key for the quotation ID in the invoice table (this is a field that contains the unique ID of the quotation within the invoices table), you can then use this field to relate back to the quotation table. If you have separate quotation lines and invoice lines you'll need to import these records across from quote lines table to invoice lines table as well, ensuring that you link the invoice lines to the new invoice record. 2. Firstly if they don't already exist create a field for the quotation foreign key in the invoice table, something like _fk_Quotation_ID or whatever format your system currently uses for naming fields. Then create a relationship between the invoices table and the quotations table between _fk_Quotation_ID in invoices and the unique ID in the quotations table. Write a script which sets a variable for the unique ID of the quotation, goes to invoices, creates a new record and sets the _fk_Quotation_ID to the value of the variable we just set, then use the Commit Records script step. Now you can use the relationship to pull all the data from the quotations file to set all the relevant data in the invoices table. Again you'll need to deal with your lines separately, however I'd recommend importing them and using replace field contents to link the lines to the invoice. Let me know if that's at all helpful or just gibberish! Vicky