IanC

Thanks for the tip Claus. I've just had this exact problem on FMS13 and Mavericks. After a restart, on the Admin Console > Status page, even though the Web Publishing Engine was ticked and green, the Web Server was not ticked and was grey. I did as you suggested and ran through the Server Deployment and within a minute everything was working without the need for a restart.

Hi I've been a developer for 15 years and have several large clients and mainly work remotely from Australia. One of my clients is a well established charity in Surrey with 5 staff that has just expanded. I am looking for someone to pass this client onto for two reasons. 1. I've got too much work. 2. They need someone local who can walk into the office when needed and help the develop reports / new features etc. I currently work for the client as and when required on a per hour basis - for both development and support. What am I looking for: 1. You can easily get to Surrey - client is easily accessible via direct train from London Waterloo. 2. Consitency - I'm not looking for a company of developers that will mean my client might be seeing a new person each time. 3. You have advanced skills 4. You might be a geek, but you have a friendly personality to patiently hold their hands through the next stage of development. 5. You will need to be CRB (Criminal Records Bureau) checked as the charity works with children - we can organise this, but if you think this is a problem then do not apply The client has PC based system with 5 users + server, FMv11 + VPN access - all up to date computers. If you think you might be the person I'm looking for: Contact me at ian@hawthornmedia.co.uk If I think you may be suitable then we can have a chat and discuss/view each others work to make sure we are on the same sheet. I would then put you in touch with the client and arrange to meet them You would discuss rates with the client (you would be paid directly by them - they are prompt payers). Then we would select the developer I am available remotely to offer support in the change-over - and in the future. Looking forward to hearing from some of you. Cheers Ian

Just in case anyone else gets this problem.... When I opened my file in Snow Leopard I found that on some machines all the text that was in Arial had disappeared. I removed the MS installed fonts (including Arial) from the User > Library > Fonts folder and the problem was fixed. FileMaker is the only app that this seems to happen in. Ian

I still get this UTF-8 problem even if I use authentication

Like Steven pointed out - having a Robot on an FM Server machine is not an ideal situation, if you can locate it on a seperate machine then it's a much better idea. But if you have a script that runs once a week/day then it's hard to justify an extra machine sometimes. I use Cron (cronnix interface) to trigger the relevant filemaker script (via applescript). I also use Timbuktu to access the server as I work remotely. As for email validation, mine is only simple, but it captures the most common errors - probably best to look through the lists of custom functions on the web for something more thorough but here's mine, it returns as TRUE for an error. Let( [ atPos= Position ( email ; "@" ; 1 ; 1 ) ; dotPos = Position ( email ; "." ; atPos ; 1 ) ; spaces = PatternCount ( email ; " " ) ; commas = PatternCount ( email ; "," ) ; theLength = Length ( email ) ] ; If( ( atPos < 2 ) or ( dotPos < 2 ) or ( dotPos = theLength ) or ( ( spaces + commas ) > 0 ) ; 1 ) )

I use a robot machine on 3 of my systems, mainly with IWP for PDF reports but also for mail. On two of these systems the robot account is on the same machine as the server. Pre FM7, this would have indeed been a recipe for disaster, but as long as you ALWAYS open the files through the server I've never had a problem - I've had this running for over a year. On one of the systems that is on the same machine as the server, the tasks are getting more intensive as we are also running PDF shrink and IWP so we are going to buy another machine just for the robot and IWP. I can't see how FUS can help as I thought it logged you out? Perhaps this has changed. Re: email addresses I check everything in FMP before sending to Mail. Also I have to run strict open record checks before committing any changes to a record in case another user is accessing, otherwise you either will get a "Someone else is modifying error" or not update your record correctly. Hope this helps.

Is working now after installing the second ATA drive. After a few restarts it finally started recognising a Valid ATA Path. I had not changed the directory structure or schedule paths. It also said that some of the firewire paths were valid but not others. I don't know what the logic is there but it was very frustrating. In summary, restarting with the drives attached (or ATA internals) seems to give you the best chance of getting a valid path.

Filemaker fixed this in 8.0v4. If the server cannot find the path, it no longer disables the backup. However, I think that there could be a lot of systems out there that have upgraded to 8.0v4 and use a drive other than the main system drive. You now have to check the dates (good practice anyway) rather than making sure than none of your scripts have disabled themselves.

I am having exactly the same problem... I have a schedule running a backup to a local firewire drive - this worked fine on Server Admin 8.0v3 but since I have upgraded to 8.0v4 it refuses to backup. It still backs up fine to the main drive though. I have now installed a second local ATA drive on the machine, and enabled the correct FSadmin permissions. The Schedule is refusing to see it as a valid path. My drive is called Drive2 the machine is a G4 mac running 10.4.7. My path is filemac:/Drive2/ Even just trying that and not the full folder path is not validating. This must be a bug. I have logged it with Filemaker.

Stuart I've got the same set up. The problem only occurs if: 1. Running 8.5 and not 8.0.3 2. Your dock and menu are on the laptop (I have my dock and menu on the cinema display) 3. The cinema display is arranged on the RIGHT rather than the LEFT Hope this stops you thinking you are going mad! Also - if you have the dock and menu on the Cinema Display, you cannot make a window width bigger than that of the laptop display, until you move the window to span both displays, then you can adjust it to be as big as you want. Tiger 10.4.7, Powerbook 12", 20" cinema, display 8.5 advanced

Have you tried this in 8.5? - All my huge PDFs returned to normal as soon as I upgraded. (Also running Tiger)

Old Advance man... thanks for clarifying the position on the one WPE to one Server limit. I had read the admin guide when I was setting up, but the error message said that I was not licensed for run more than one WPE - suggesting that it might be possible to purchase a license to run another. Would be SO handy. Re: the PHP API, it's only a single view page with a built in query - no login or interaction. Thanks.

Hi Zip I tried something similar to this and failed. My publishing engine (8.0.4) is on an intranet webserver (Tiger/Apache) - a different machine to my FMSA (8.0.4 / Tiger) . This set-up works fine. However,we have two websites(intranet and extranet), so I tried loading a second publishing engine onto the extranet webserver machine (Tiger / Apache) and connecting this in to the FMSA, but it said it was not licensed for more than one engine. I don't know if you can buy more licences but as soon as I add a WPE identifier on the Client configuration page of FMSA, the add button goes grey. If you try and link two WPEs with the same identifier to a single FMSA, the second one will refuse to connect. I don't want to put both sites on the same webserver as I cannot control access to the intranet via the firewall, and since scripting with IWP is server side I cannot test for external IPs. I am currently using the new Filemaker PHP API for m clients but would rather use IWP as the development cost is so much lower. I know I've only got one server but I hope this helps. Ian

In version 8 I was getting consistently bloated PDFs (sometimes 100MB+) when using the Save as PDF script step, but in 8.5 this problem seems to have disappeared - has anyone else noticed this? I have not seen it listed in the 'New features'. (8.5 advanced / Mac OS X 10.4.7)

Hi Has anyone experienced anything like this? I'm running FM Advanced Server 8.0v3 on Mac OS X 10.4.6 2GHz G5 1.5GB RAM. It's serving an intranet using Apache on the same machine. Runs fine for days on end then suddenly the Web publishing engine freezes - can't logon via web - and I can't get things moving again unless I restart the machine. FileMaker Clients can still connect OK. Apache can be stopped and restarted. So I tried to stop FileMaker Web Publishing using SystemStarter in terminal and get an error involving eof in wpc_ctl in StartupItems. (I'll write it down properly next time it happens). Any suggestions much appreciated.

My PDFs and jpegs are both stored directly. Online, the PDFs appear as filenames and the jpegs as images. The PDFs download when clicked on. For my PDFs I use the insert file comamnd. If I use the insert picture command I just get a Question mark symbol.

Is that a v8 or v7 screenshot? I get that result in v8, but in v7 all the blanks are replaced by 0's

I'm also finding this problem with the MIN and SUM functions. Attatched to this message is another test file - open it in v7 and you will see 3 columns of mainly 0's. Open it in v8 and they have all been replaced by blanks. Does anyone else have a problem with this or is it just something on my machine??? (OS X 10.4.2) Ian test02.zip

Hi Opening an existing solution in FM8 I came across the following problem. In FM7... My table has a number calculation field 'Max(lines::value)' - it returns the maximum value of a field in the related table. The calculation is unchecked for 'do not evaluate if all referenced fields are empty'. Therefore if there are no related records it returns a 0. My script searches this calculation field with the criteria '<1' which therefore returns all records without related values in FM8... Opening this file in v8 the zero's have disappeared from the calculated field, thus I get no results with my '<1' search and have to do an '=' search to get my found set. I've created a test file and attached it to this message so you can test this for yourself I wasn't aware of any structural changes in v8, it all seemed quite cosmetic - is there a comprehensive list of changes anywhere? Thanks Ian p.s. I realise that perhaps the Max calculation should read 'Max(0 ; lines::value) to force a default value, and in fact this is a workaround, but it's the change in the result between the two versions that I am highlighting. test.zip

Aha - you're dead right, I was using the old print command and choosing save as PDF, but using the new 'Save Records as PDF' command saves it as a 480K file - still bigger than the 364K with v7 but I can live with that. Thanks for your help.

I have just used FileMaker 8 to create my monthly invoicing pdfs. Usually these are two pages of text per file (including one small PICT graphic) and come in about 300K. In FileMaker 8 they are a massive 2.9MB. To double-check I swapped back to v7 and produced them from there - no problem, they came out at 300K each. I PDFed another report in v8 with just text and it was still 10 times bigger than one produced in v7. Anyone else getting massive PDFs? (Mac G4 10.4.2). Ian