bchaplin

Attached is a screenshot of what we're trying to do. We want to place the XSLT code via the "Use XSLT stylesheet - Calculation" option in an Import Records script step.

We're trying to create a Filemaker file that will perform one task: importing reports that are in XML format. The reports are always in exactly the same format, and an XSLT file has been created that successfully does the job when referenced as an external file during the import process. Now we'd like to embed the XSLT file in the database. Yet every time we do this we get an error message: We've tried pasting the XSLT in a text field and we've tried pasting it directly into the relevant box in the Import XML dialog box that is part of a script. Any tricks we need to know, involving line endings or characters we need to escape in the XSLT language?

Hi. I need to create an XSLT stylesheet that will allow import of XML. The XML I'm importing is fairly simple (one specific scientific assay that outputs in a consistent format). I think I 'get' the basics of XML, but have never learned any XSLT. Should I ask my workplace to purchase a book for me, and if so, what do you recommend to get this project going quickly? Or are there online resources that would be sufficient? Time frame for learning & writing the stylesheet is 1-2 weeks.

I just need to know if the following is possible with FM 8 or 8.5 (at work, we are still running version 6!) We have a database which displays multiple records per person, in portals. By hand, I have exported this information into a tab-separated text file, imported it into Excel, and constructed a fairly complex graph based on it. Now my boss wants me to find a way to automate this process so that a novice could do it, relatively quickly, for hundreds of records. I can buy the latest version of Filemaker if this will help us accomplish the task. Is FM v.8 more powerful than v.6 for this kind of thing? So, can I script not only the export of certain fields, but also their import into Excel and the chart creation, through some sort of AppleScript? We are running Mac OS X Tiger, but the end users are on Windows. If there was a plug-in that would make the charts from within FM, that would be even better. I've googled but so far I haven't found anything that will graph the content of portals.

HTML and jpg formats will be around for a while, hopefully; I was thinking more of the lifespan of iphoto versus Filemaker Pro. The photos themselves will be stored on the hard drive (as jpg files), but I want to make sure that the annotations that I make are also retained for as long as the photos are. I'm actually going to try using Filemaker Pro (I've already set up the database), and we'll see how it works out. Thanks for the posting. I like your photos!

I am about to purchase a digital camera and, although the number of images I will store will be very small compared to most of the people using these forums, am thinking of using a FM 6 database to store them locally on my Mac rather than iPhoto. (I have an ibook running OS X.) My reasons are this: From my job, I am pretty familiar with designing databases in FM, and so I'm actually more comfortable with FM than iPhoto. And, I want to export some of the photos on a regular basis to my website, and think that FM will be easier to automate in this respect (creating fields to keep track of which photos I've uploaded to the server, creating categories that will be uploaded as well, etc...) It seems to me that FM offers more flexibility than iPhoto in terms of allowing me to store the information to my own specifications, and better capabilities as far as uploading info and getting it into a mySQL database (which I'd then use to create the html pages, via perl.) In fact, I am considering purchasing FM 6 just for this project (I only have previous FM versions, which as far as I can tell, do not easily allow the import of photos into a database). Am I going too far with this project? (I have a tendency to overdo things all out of proportion to the needs of a project.) Should I try using iPhoto first? Are there any other small-scale users out there who have used FM to store the information about their photos? One final thought: I'm always afraid of what happens when software companies go out of business. As I want to keep the photo database for decades, it seems like FM is a better solution, because I can always export the info in a tab-separated file and move it elsewhere, and the photos themselves will be stored as jpg images on my hard drive, a format which hopefully will be around for a while!