GusCoombes

Just working with a customer who has already got all her clients in the Mac OS Address Book app - and now it looks like the same work again putting them into my FM Address Book. Anybody got a neat way of interfacing between the two? Anything better than Copy&Paste would be highly appreciated...

I just installed 5.5 on 10.2.2 and it seems to run. I had problems getting it to work on an old beige G3, but switched to a B/W 350MHz G3 and everything seems OK.

Just wanted to say thanks to djgogi and Bob for the tips. I have a limited budget for what is now the next phase of a long project - but Bob, I will give your further ideas some thought and the script is definitely a winner. Thanks for sharing your ideas here. One thing that LiveOak mentioned: fields that size themselves? Maybe I could use that to help me decide whther a letter is so long that it needs to split over several pages or fits on one when printed out? Any ideas in that direction?

Can't tell you much about binding, but if you only want to serve to about 10 users on a LAN, get FMPro Server and run it on a standard Mac OS machine - which should run nothing else at the same time - as the previous poster said, no filesharing. Just a plain vanilla system with as much turned off as possible. My guess about the binding would be that you don't need to do it with Server, as the Server is optimised to look after multiple files and clients on a LAN. Serving over the Internet or a WAN - maybe you need Unlimited and binding. My experience is, if you need to do maintenance you can grab the copy of your files that Server will make periodically (you can set this up as you need in the preferences). Once you've edited this, you may have to re-import your data if the users have been changing stuff in the meantime, but you shouldn't have any problems otherwise.

For all those whose posts I've read here, who are having problems with 5.5 having updated their system to X.1.5 - I got it sorted, finally. The problem was the preferences file for FMPro. I just deleted it and bingo - now FMPRo starts up, just as before. This is in the "Your Username"/Library/Preferences/FileMaker Pref. Folder, not the general root Preferences folder. It's not a standard text file so you can't edit it or see what's wrong with it. It would be nice if you could... I guess the update to X.1.5 or the networking update changed some features of networking, so when FMPro tried to access the TCP/IP network, it found something which didn't fit any more. Maybe FM should check this out - it would be nice to at least get an error message, not just an app that won't start any more...

It's an old post now I see, but anyways - for those considering the options, my experience is that FileMaker Pro Server 5.0 and therefore probably 5.5 works absolutely fine on an older G3 or G4 Mac. You don't need an XServer or any Mac Server software to run FMPro Server - in fact, I think FM recommends against using Pro Server on a Server machine. The most important thing is to have a dedicated machine running your FMPro Server. You will get better stability and less hassles running FMPro Server on an old G3 than running it in combination with OS X Server on the latest greatest Server box. Just install the minimum system necessary and _nothing_ else, and observe the notes made in the best practise technote from FM. This BTW, is not v. technical _at all_, so don't hesitate to browse through it. It's full of common sense tips, and will help you get the best out of your setup.

You do not need to run FM Server on a Server machine - irrespective of whether the Server machine is running X or 9. I have an old 7500 PowerMac running 9.2.2 as my FileMaker Server platform and it works fine. The whole Mac crashes every now and again, but a restart sorts everything out. I will be moving to X shortly though, as this system is ideal for Macs that should just stay on the whole time. As a client - i.e. work Mac - X has it's pitfalls at the moment, but they have nothing to do with the Unix underpinnings. I expect FMPro Server on an X client system to simply improve on the stability of my 7500 running 9.2.2

I also have a problem with FMPro under OS X 10.1.5. I used the programme without problem under 10.1.4. Then I installed the 10.1.5 Update and now the FMPro programme won't start any more. It just quits silently. Any ideas? I will try the plist trick later.

Hallo, I have the same problem I have had a couple of times before - maybe you can help. I want to take text from a number of fields and concatenate it in one field. This is the easy bit =) But I want to insert a return between each of the entries I am adding, because otherwise the text all ends up on line and is - for a human - very difficult to read. I have searched around here and no-one seems to have an answer for this... I cannot use related fields, as the text entries I am dealing with are contact reports and range in length from a couple of lines to a couple of paragraphs. Therefore I can't make a field that will accommodate them all - FM does not allow the creation of flexible fields that size themselves to the content. Anyway, I am sure this should be really simple - a sort of one liner in Perl. But how do I get a return in there? <br> nl : Cheers Gus

Thanks guys! I think I now have a script that works - one of the stumbling blocks was that I am calling another script in the script which iterates. I think that every time I called this, the Current Row function defaulted back to the first row. I'm now using the Count function to check how many rows are present and writing this into variable. I also note the current row in another variable, which is updated in each loop. I haven't tried to figure out if the automatic break-off in the "goto next row" function now works - I'm sticking to checking to see if (currentRow=totalRows) returns true, 'cos _that_ works 8) Many thanks for your suggestions - Happy New Year. Now I just have to get everything else to work... Gus [ January 03, 2002: Message edited by: Gus ]

I have created a portal showing a few fields from a related file. Everything works great, but I'm now trying to write a script to iterate through the portal rows - to do this I need to know when to stop! The FM function