TimGFoley

Well I found a plugin to automate the imports... its called Dialog Magic. http://www.newmillennium.com/dialogmagic.htm However, the bloody author wants $79 for a single user license! Thats over $100 Canadian for a simple plugin.... I'll keep looking but for others that are willing to spend the money, there is one solution...

Well Kurt, read my previous thread about how to dynamically display a picture in browse mode using only a file and path reference in the database. All the reponses I got were "its not possible in FMP5". Sure you can kludge around it using AppleScript or possibly a plugin, but the native scripting does not appear to have a method. Please, by all means, if you know of a native trick to do what I am trying to achieve, please fire away! I'm dying to drop Access and move to Filemaker and can certainly learn new methods and interfaces but for my current application of the price book I'm kinda stuck. I may still just write a simple applescript and ensure that I run it EACH time i open my database to ensure all the references in the container fields are updated. Hopefully FMP6, if its coming one day, will address issues like mine. On a side note, if you know of a freeware plugin that will do the trick, I'm willing to give that a try now. Thanks Tim

I've currently using UD4 on the Mac running JDBC to a MySQL server running on Linux. The Linux machine is running Apache and Tomcat (aka Jakarta) for serving the JSP pages. Works like a charm but was quite a challenge to setup on the Linux side. For the Mac side, I am using UD4's new feature of using the web server for database connectivity, this way I didn't have to mess with JDBC or any other headaches on the Mac, it simply use the Linux box to serve pages for me in Design mode and Runtime mode. I did have UD1 (the version before 4) running with the rmijdbc driver on the mac talking to a Windows NT Server running rmijdbc to a MS Access database without any problems. In fact it was quite easy once I starting searching the web on tips using www.deja.com. I didn't know that FMP5 had a proper ODBC-JDBC bridge in it, I'll have to have a look around. Try doing some searches on www.deja.com of the newsgroups with keywords like "ultradev" and "filemaker" and you might get lucky.

I'm going through the same problem. While Access is M$ and comes with all the headaches we all know about, it is just so powerfull in terms of coding and scripting (hence why its likely so bloated...heh). If your like me and trying to use FileMaker Pro 5, you might try the Developer edition, it seems like it more coding in it. FMP5 has this silly script maker that is far too "User Friendly" for me... (read: simple). I have yet to try the Developer Edition, hope to soon. If you have any luck with the Developer ed or find a way to script the death out of FMP5, please post a response on your findings compared to the Access way of doing things.

I recently did a fair amount of attempting to convert from MS Access to FileMaker. Simpliest method was to export my database tables to Excel on the PC and then on the Mac export the Excel spreadsheet to Tab Delimited format. Once its in Tab Del, its a easy import into any database program and FileMaker had no problem at all with it. Imported all my tables. Course you won't get any of the code you've written for your database, that is a major re-write. I imagine I could have just exported my Access tables directly from Access to Tab Delimited but I wanted to leave nothing to chance and Excel is perfectly cross platform compatbile. However, I've been finding FileMaker far too limited in terms of scripting and coding. Access you can put VB code anywhere and everywhere but with FileMaker it seems to rely to much on manually run scripts or AppleScripts. I've been using MySQL for the web backend and thats been quite handy so far but of course it doesn't have a fancy front end like Access or FileMaker. Going to check out 4D next I guess or try to get a copy of FileMaker Developer and see if its a little more powerfull. All in all, I hate to admit it but I haven't found a true competitor to Access on the Mac yet in terms of flexibility but I'll keep plodding.

That would be the case if I was actually using the container objects to store the file. However, my database only contains the path and filename of the picture. I just need a way to display that pic (well, the pic that the path and filename point to) in the form on browse mode. Its very easy to do in MS Access but since I'm the only Mac-head in our office, I'd like to use a Mac Database for my interface to the price book. Looks like I'm stuck or I just live without the pictures. Someone should really beat filemaker over the head over this one, thats a pretty basic feature. The problem with actually putting the pics in the database is the size. I also have the need of the file name and path for my web clients. I have a web front end to the database for our web site and other people that don't run MS Access directly. I guess I'll just run the web client myself for now. Are plugin's a pain to write? I can code anything in C for Dos or Unix... so i could muddle my way through Mac... unless the plugins don't use C... Oh well, thanks for the help guys, I'll keep an eye open.

Hmm, but there is no way ti change the reference of that container field is there? You have to manually option click on each record and find the pic? or create an Apple script that imports the pics into the container fields. The problem with the script is that you'd have to run that script every 5 seconds or so to catch any picture modifications and changes while someone is working on the price book...yeach. hehe Or did I miss something and there is a way to script container fields?

I can't believe this is so difficult to find, so I hope I am just missing something obvious, though I've been searching web sites and news groups for hours. I have a simple "Price Book" database in FileMaker Pro 5 for Mac. One of the fields is a Text field with a "filename to a JPEG image". I simply want the browse screen to display the picture when a record appears (just like a web page would with <img src="mypic.jpg"> ). I can't seem to find anything to do this, INSERT PICTURE doesn't appear to let you specify a variable for the Filename. The ScriptMaker in FMP5 seems to be highly crippled, I can't manually edit any of the code to force Insert Picture to point to a database field. Container fields looked promising but I can't find a way to dynamically pull a picture via a filepath specification into a container when the next record button is hit etc. I've looked at various AppleScripts and plugins to do the work but I don't want to import the pictures, I want to keep them out of the database, just store the filename and path and dynamically display them when the database is browsed. There has to be a simple way to do this, in MS Word you would simply use a Merge Field and Insert Picture, MS Access was something similar but I can't for the life of me find a way in FMP5. Please if anyone knows a way, post a reply. Thanks...bashing my head more Tim