Wim Decorte

You may want to pay attention to their API and their ask to not crawl the covers: https://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/api/covers

Not having to to pay for the Windows license part of a virtual machine will definitely make a difference, but the more horsepower you need the less it make a difference. This I don't understand: A FM VPS is nothing but a VM with FMS running on it so I don't get the distinction you're making here. If you mean having FMS as an appliance, containerized (Docker,...): then yes, it's possible. A few of us have already done that.

You also may want to adopt a naming convention for your fields so that you can tell whether they are global or not. That makes it easier to read your code and interpret it. Plus your future self will thank you for it.

You don't need to create global fields in that table, you can use a dedicated table just for global fields and keep your schema 'clean'. Plus if you are capturing the user's input for what to search on, you can use variables

Why is "find field" a field in that table? Is it a global field?

I don't think FMS15 is supported on Server 2016 so don't even try; even if you can get it installed, certain components of FMS may not run as expected. I recently had to reinstall an FMS15 for a client too and initially had the same problem. Downloading and installing these in sequence, each time explicitly right-clicking the installer and choosing "run as administrator" was the key (even though I was already logged in as an administrator!) - Web Farm Framework module version 1.0: http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/7/0/57065640-4665-4980-a2f1-4d5940b577b0/webfarm_v1.1_amd64_en_us.msi - External cache module version 1.0: http://download.microsoft.com/download/3/4/1/3415F3F9-5698-44FE-A072-D4AF09728390/ExternalDiskCache_amd64_en-US.msi - ARR version 3.0: http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/3/D/63D67918-483E-4507-939D-7F8C077F889E/requestRouter_x64.msi

Straight from the release notes: it won't be available. https://support.claris.com/s/article/FileMaker-Server-for-Linux-Developer-Preview-Information?language=en_US

Make sure to run the installer by right-clicking it and and choose "as administrator"

I believe that if you go to the download page from your existing license, you'll see the new downloads and your 19 keys. Ours were available like this early on Tuesday, even without getting the notice.

You call them and tell them to escalate the ticket; don't take 'no' for an answer; you're a customer. Forums like this one and the official community one are not official Claris support channels. We can help with our experience but if you need/want official support you have to be on the phone with them until you get what you are after. The only other place where you can post an official issue is here: https://community.claris.com/en/s/topic/0TO0H000008OQOGWA4/report-a-product-issue But that is not more efficient than just calling them and not letting go until it is escalated.

If they have used those exact words (we won't help you because it is deprecated) then escalate the support ticket. Deprecated means "will be removed in a future version", which happened in 19. You are entitled to support.

And it did for a while (FMS 5.5) but not enough people started using to warrant the ongoing development and support... so it seems like your "unacceptable" was perfectly acceptable to many.

Yes, you have a typo: on the WHERE line, remove the quote between ? and AND

No, don't delete the GROUP BY, the GROUP BY is responsible for summarizing the data so that each type is listed only once, it's how sql knows how to sum the values. Your sql syntax looks correct but not your executeSQL() as the last parameter, use a reference to the field itself because you need the field's value. Using my demo file that would make it: ExecuteSQL( _sql ; "" ; "" ; "4/1/2020" ; "4/30/2020" ; demo::type )

It's not FM that becomes 'techy' in this case, it's the requirements of modern auth. The days of simply providing a username and pw are sliding into the past very quickly and it is not going to get simpler. FM - as a platform - provides the building blocks to do this, and demos like this one make it a 'solved problem' because anyone can take it and use it. The deployment of these techniques will undoubtedly become easier over time but the basic complexity of it won't go away, in fact it will get worse. It's not FM that make this harder, it's the service providers. The learning curve doesn't change from one platform to the other because it is how the service providers dictate that this should be done. If you can't use basic auth for SMTP then that applies equally to something simple like FM or something complex as a .NET app.