stanley

Such a strange problem, because this is FMP and so shouldn't run into that kind of issue, especially as ours are volume licenses and are otherwise working fine. At the same time, it's an FMP software update that kicked off this problem, and this kind of thing does happen. We'll reach out to Claris and get new license certificates... Thanks!

We have just encountered this same error on one of our Windows machines. Was there an official fix for this? I will reach out to our sales rep but am hoping someone here actually got to the root of the problem.

Hi Charles Please reach out to me directly via email: stanley.carswell at telekom.com - because this is a corporate gig, the first step would be to send a resume. As I wrote above, we are considering adding a contractor, and if I can show that there are qualified candidates who fit that profile, then it would strengthen the case to do it that way. Thanks Stanley

FULL-TIME FILEMAKER DEV NEEDED Due to the recent departure of a key member of our FileMaker dev team, we are looking for a full-time dev; the job description follows. This is technically a 9 to 5 office job, but due to COVID-19 there's really no such thing any more, so working remotely is totally acceptable. The team office is in Connecticut, but I'll be honest and say that nobody really goes there any more. You would be working for a global multi-national telecoms corporation, with some responsibility for server and staff support globally; this translates into some flexible/unusual working hours. The job description concentrates on web-based UI/UX because our next major project is to take a very large FileMaker system and convert it entirely to WebDirect, with optimizations for laptop, tablet, and mobile phone. There is some possibility of this being part-time or contract work, although that's extremely unusual for this organization, and I'm not certain that management is actually serious about that. If you're interested, please reach out directly to me with a resume, or with any questions. Cheers! Stanley POSITION TITLE: OSS Software Developer/Designer POSITION PURPOSE: Work with our OSS Network Infrastructure team developing software tools as required, including web sites, FileMaker solutions, and EDIs between systems, concentrating on web-based UI/UX. Provide all levels of support including first-level support, server administration, and emergency support. Write documentation and training materials related to development and admin tasks. Customers are all internal to the corporation, around the world. ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES: FileMaker design/development Website and FileMaker WebDirect interface design/development First-level User Support Server/Robot Administration Write Documentation, both internal development docs, and end-user training docs OTHER DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES: Seek out new development opportunities within the corporation Keep up to date on the state of the art in FileMaker development and UI/UX QUALIFICATIONS: UI/UX design experience, including practical use of design tools, is required Written composition skills, including illustrated documentation, are required FileMaker development/deployment experience extremely helpful Website design, software prototyping, software testing are all extremely helpful Data API experience, especially data architecture, database schema, and xml, all helpful Being able to act independently and responsibly within a small team is essential EDUCATION: Solid background in software solution development and design Bachelor’s Degree helpful, but not required FileMaker Certification (14 and above) helpful, but not required

Hi Wim Thanks for that info. I'll dig deeper into the API to see what we need to do there. Stanley

Hi Wim Ah, yes, the xml API. Not something I've used very much, I have to admit. The scenario is this: we have an external system (based on who-knows-what, probably SAP) whose admin wants to exchange transaction-based data with one of our FileMaker 11 systems, running on FMS. By this I mean he wants to set it up so that when an order is processed in his system, data is pushed out to our FMP system, and then when that data is modified in a specific way in FMP, we push data back out to his system. Normally when we do this with external systems, we use a file-exchange process, where we dump data for individual transactions into separate xml files on an SFTP server, where the receiving system is responsible for picking up the data and then moving the xml files to an archive. I like this because it leaves such a clear audit trail, and because the raw data is always there for debugging purposes. However, this time, the other side wants to send everything via HTTP Post, as I wrote before. Before I go any further, can you clarify something for me: is FMS and the xml API capable of encryption (as in HTTPS?) Any other advice on where to begin with this whole thing is much appreciated. Thanks Stanley

Hi All: I have recently had a query from a colleague where he wants to exchange data with FileMaker Server via HTTPS Post of xml data. Has anyone been able to set something like this up, as a two-way data exchange? I imagine that it might not be possible via HTTPS, but perhaps as HTTP? Any suggestions are welcome, as I have not seen any evidence that this is possible. Thanks in advance Stanley

Incrementing '00001' when it is defined as a text field will maintain the formatting. This is commonly done when creating serial numbers that need leading zeros for padding (because, for example, that format is required for export or whatever.) Cheers Stanley

Hi Yianibb: You need FileMaker Pro 12, which is the client version. See here: http://www.filemaker.com/products/filemaker-pro/?homepage=fmp-product-line You can download a free 30-day trial from FMI which will let you edit your file. Cheers Stanley

Hi wvms: You should be able to stop the server from the command line (using Terminal on the Mac). I barely ever use the command line so I won't give you faulty instructions here. Use of the command line is very well documented though, and it's a great way to steer around the Admin Console and its quirky behavior. Cheers Stanley

I have a second server running on the same switch, which does not have the same problem. When this has occurred (it's only been twice so far) I have not had the same issue with the second server. However, I have not really compared their configurations too closely. Thanks for the SSL thing - yes, we are using SSL!

Hi All I posted this on TechNet, but want to try you guys as well. We have a very busy production server running FMSA9 on Windows Server 2003 (yeah, go tell it to our IT department) and twice this week users have lost the ability to acquire the server. What we see is this: Users with no files open on the server cannot see the server. Users with any file open on the server can see all the files on the server. Users with any file open on the server can work as normal. Admin can run the console remotely (but a bit slow). Admin can RDC into the server normally. Rebooting the server solves the problem, but this is happening during the middle of the day, with most users unaffected, so that's not a great solution. Has anyone seen this before? I have a vague recollection of having a similar problem years ago, but can't recall if that was on 5.5 or 7 or what. Any hints appreciated. Thanks Stanley

Hi Krea: What probably happened is that the serial number field you can see was created after some records already existed, and thus those records don't have serial numbers. I will assume that your serial number is being used as a primary key for relationships, meaning you cannot simply replace all the numbers with new numbers. However, if that is NOT the case, you can write a simple looping script to set new serial numbers. Although FileMaker does have an internal record ID, it's not available to you, so you will need to assign the missing serial numbers yourself. Depending on the number of records, you can either do that manually or via a scripted process. If you script it, you could just find a 'hole' in your numbering (or, if your numbering begins with 1 and goes up from there, create a 'hole' by changing what the next value for the field will be, increasing it by enough to give you values to assign to your existing unserialized records. So, if you have 1000 records, and 900 of them have serials going from 1 to 900, you would set the next value of your serial field to 1001, then assign (via a looping n=n+1 and SetField script) the numbers 901-1000 to the unserialized records. HTH Stanley

Hi genr8er I wouldn't even explore the possibilities. FMP 5 and CDML are so old that you'll no doubt run into all sorts of compatibility issues, even if you do find a browser/OS combination that looks like it works okay. Instead, you should try to use the client's request for a web front end as leverage to get them to upgrade the whole solution. Just my five cents' worth. Stanley

Oh yeah. Basic implementation's not a problem. Fitting it into our solution (which is extremely convoluted) will take a bit of labor, but not that big a deal, really. Thanks to all, and I'll post how it turns out... Stanley

Get(SystemLanguage) doesn't work for us. 75% of the time it will be 'English' (and anyway, English (US) is mm/dd/yyyy and English (UK) is dd/mm/yyyy.) Thanks for the suggestion, though.

Aha! That's a step in the right direction. When a record is exported to xml, the actual system settings for the date are tagged, as follows: DATEFORMAT="M/d/yyyy" or DATEFORMAT="D/m/yyyy" Well done, Comment! Although it'll be a lot of work to implement, at least it is a way to solve my problem. Certainly deserving of a beer at DevCon! Thanks Stanley

Comment Said: "Another way: export anything as XML and peek at the DATEFORMAT attribute of the DATABASE element." Oh, now we might be on to something!

Hi Comment: I'm not sure I follow that. If I bring in today's date (27 July 2010) as $$date and I do this: GetAsNumber($$date) I get 733980 regardless of being on mdy or dmy system settings. Okay. But is there a way to enter that value and have FMP turn that into a valid date in the current system's format? In other words, a way to get that entered in as 27/7/10 on a dmy system or 7/27/10 for mdy? Thanks Stanley

Hi Ray: The problem with your calc is that it assumes that the 'day' value could be found via Left(x;2). But it can't in this case because the date fields are always resolving as mm/dd/yyyy because that was the format of the system the file was created on. The system of the client is not taken into account when parsing/analyzing a date field, but it IS taken into account when entering a date field...

That's right. That's what causes the problem, Comment. If I try to detect the Left(x;2) value, I will always get the month because this file was created in the US. But I may actually be on a computer with System settings for Europe, so the day value should go in that slot. It's frustrating.

Hello All: This is a puzzle caused by the way FMP internally formats dates. If you're at all conversant with the issue, you know that FMP's default format for all dates is based on the date format on the machine where the file in question was first created. For those of us in the US, that means that for almost all of our files, FMP is internally formatting the dates as mm/dd/yyyy. Now, FMP will display the dates in whatever the current system format is, so for the most part you never have to worry about the internal formatting. And the actual date value is based on the number of days since 1 January, Year 1 CE (or 1/1/0001). Now that we have the introduction out of the way, let me explain what the problem is. We have a large FMP system (currently running on multiple instances of Server 9 and 10) which is used around the world. These systems communicate with lots of other systems, also based all around the world, which are of different sorts - SAP, Oracle, SQL, and so-on. While developing an EDI between an SAP system and our FMP system, I have discovered that I sometimes get dates which are formatted backwards (i.e., mm/dd/yyyy versus dd/mm/yyyy) because although I know the format of the data being brought in, I do not know the format of the computer that is running the script in question. The data is being brought in via a raw xml file, which is imported into a text field and then parsed, so the value (let's call it $$date) is being put into the date field (let's call it DateField, and it is indeed a date field) via a SetField step. Simple enough. Except the data in $$date is always in the format dd/mm/yyyy, and if the date is, say, 26/07/2010 and the computer is set to US date format, then the result is that DateField, of course, gets the value '?'. Because there's no 26th month of the year. If the computer is set to European dd/mm/yyyy format, this problem goes away completely, but not all of our clients are in Europe. My original solution was to have a globally stored value for each of our files, saying what the national format was (dmy or mdy), and although that might cover 80% of usage, the files are accessed from across borders (there are US colleagues who might access any of the files, for example) so that solution is actually no good. I decided to try to detect the formatting of the currently active computer (the one calling the script) so I could know whether to flip the day & month around in my SetField statement, and that's when things got weird. In my example, where the dd/mm/yyyy date I am using is coming in as the text string '26/07/2010', which I store as $$date, I get the following values: $$date = '26/07/2010' GetAsText($$date) = '07/26/2010' Left($$date;2) = '7/' I could bore you with all the iterations of this I have tried (including GetAsDate(), GetAsNumber() and everything else I could think of, in every combination I could dream up. But I won't punish you, because I'm asking for your help. What I had wanted to do was to detect that leading 26, which would tell me the date was mdy via a calculation like: If( Left($$date;2) <> Left($$date+1;2) AND Left($$date;2) <> Left ($$date-1;2) ; "dmy" ; "mdy"). However, regardless of the date settings of my machine, the above values do not change, so I always detect '7/' for the first two characters. That's because FMP is secretly converting the date value in $$date to a text value, using its hidden formatting, and thus is always putting the month first. Because the file was created on a US-format machine. My question to you is how to detect the date format of the current machine. With this information I can then know how to format the known date value when using SetField. Sorry for being so long-winded, and I thank you all in advance. Stanley

Well, I wrote what I guess was a convincing brief, and we're going to be able to move to OS X for development. We're keeping Windows machines to do testing, debugging and client-mirroring, but the actual heavy lifting will now all be done on the Mac. Which is good for us. Stanley

Hi Rod: The problem is actually the number formatting. In the system catwoman is talking about (which I also work on), the currency is defined via its 3-letter code (USD, GBP, etc), which is stored in a separate table. So, in the US, to show $10,000.00, you have: Currency = "USD" Price = 10000 Displays as: USD 10,000.00 But, in Europe, they're stuck with the same formatting in the number field, so they get: Currency = "EUR" Price = 10000 Displays as: EUR 10,000.00 What we're after is the ability to display that number field in the right format. Thus: EUR 10.000,00 The problem is we're using FMP number formatting, set to 2 decimal places, '.' for decimal divider and ',' as thousands divider. This means our currencies are always displaying in the US format. Any suggestions? Thanks Stanley

Well, that's good to hear. The more we look into our virtualization problems, the less we seem to comprehend... -Stanley