Peter Wagemans

I have the following situation at a cutomer of mine: FileMaker Go solution that is deployed via MDM software on ten employees' iPads. This is done via the runtime binding of FileMaker Go via XCode, making the solution an iOS application. An "In House" development certificate is required for this. Any other solution won't work. So I am included as a paying Apple developer in the team of my customer's subscription, and the customer then has the right to deploy "in house". After almost 10 years of cashing 300 $/€ per year so we can generate the certificate yearly, Apple has decided not to renew my customer's annual subscription. The absurd reason given is that my client (now) has fewer than 100 employees, and thus therefore does not meet the requirements for this developer program. The strange thing about this decision is that Apple doesn't actually offer an alternative. They apparently do not realize that they are terrorizing their faithful customer - this really is an Apple bastion - and boycotting the product of their daughter company Claris. Not to talk about my business as well. Maybe I should not call it terrorism, but it is certainly some kind of discrimination based on the number of employees. After several conversations, the contacts at Apple still seem oblivious to reason. I find it hard to believe that Apple behaves this way towards its loyal and paying customers. I can understand why Apple does not offer certain products to a market that is not interested in them. I can understand a bit less that Apple refuses to sell certain solutions to companies based on their size. I cannot understand why Apple takes away a subscription from a customer when their company does not meet size requirements anymore. My customer is forced to sue Apple and demand damages, in order to find the budget to rewrite a solution based on another platform. Which will be extremely difficult, as the whole company is FileMaker based. Does anyone know a good contact person at Apple who is above this mindless following of stupid rules?

It turned out not to be too bad. For some reason the last file of the 60 files is not getting processed, but I think I remember this bug from years ago. One file got corrupted in the process, and could not be opened on startup. 4 or 5 references to the renamed file were not adapted, 20 references were adapted. Untrustworthy little old tool, but it beats adapting those refs manually. I just hope it doesn't mess things up more than it is supposed to fix. Over and out.

Hi Forum, It's been a VERY long time since I used the "Developer Utilities" menu. The reason is that I have a very old development here, and as it happens a lot of times, the (DYI) customer started out with files having a certain goal, but they evolved into completely other files, and now the filenames are completely wrong. It's about 60 files, and I thought I do the experiment with renaming 1 file, and see if things would go well. And they do not. The file gets renamed, all the other files get copied, and the file reference is not adapted in any file. Are these file references not supposed to be adapted? Just to be sure, I looked it up: https://help.claris.com/en/pro-help/content/developer-utilities.html Look like it supposwed to do it. The log file goes like this: Can anyone confirm that this is indeed broken, or am I missing something?

Hi Conner, sorry not to get back immediately. I was about to search for an Apache distribution to download and install, but then I wondered: what about a FileMaker Server worker install? Wouldn't it be logicial to install this? It contains an Apache server, not? If that makes sense, what about the Zulu installer? Would it make the necessary modification as described above? Somehow this all surprises me. I would expect the 360Works Wiki to elaborate a bit more on installating Zulu on a seperate machine, instead of just on the FileMaker Server itself.

I hope my reaction wasn't too harsh, English is not my native language, and where I live we tend to speak our minds rather directly. Let me rephrase that last post. Please advice which web server I should install.

I will attempt any webserver you recommend in your documentation 🙂 so currently none, just a plain vanilla install of macos on an M1 mini. IMHO you should promote the name of this kind of installation to “standalone” instead of “custom” and provide full documentation on how to do that. As you probably know, Claris recommends not running any extra software on the FMS machine, so this is not such an odd request.

Hi 360 Works Official Product Support Zulu - FileMaker, iCal & Google Calendar forum, About 10 years later after the installation of a Zulu server on a FileMaker Server, the server starts acting strangely and does not accept connections anymore, it seems like a low level TCP thing, far to many sockets in time_wait. Of course these things do not happen all by themselves, but it's hard to figure out what triggered it. Workload is about the same, in fact there's less calendars than before, filters on the calendar request have always limited the amount of traffic, and folks don't have more events than before. Of course there are FileMaker Server updates, macOS updates and Java updates that could be the underlying cause of the intermittent lock ups of the Zulu server - a few times per day. I'm not the IT manager, but the FileMaker developer, and was therefore only called in when the problem did not get resolved after more than 10 days of "suffering", as my customer calls it. First advice I gave was to isolate the Zulu Server - imho the customer has far too many things running on the same machine - on a completely new Mac, so we have less moving parts. Yesterday evening I did the standalone install, and because of standalone config, I changed the XML file with the IP address of the server from 127.0.0.1 to the IP address of the FIleMaker Server, changed the deployment script in FileMaker to use the IP address of the server to the IP address and port of the Zulu server. Presto, it worked right away, using http requests in iCal - we currently use subscription only. Long intro, sorry. Now for the https part. Not really clear in the documentation how to implement https when having a Zulu standalone install. Using the standard installation on the FileMaker Server, it is clear we can use the web server included with FileMaker, and everything is fine and configured for us. For the standalone version, I'm overlooking something in the documentation I guess. I cannot find where it says how to correctly do this. I understand I have to have a webserver instance on the Zulu Server, right? I would like to go for the least complicated, and most stable solution. Don't we all. Thanks for any help, official or unofficial.

Wow. Simple. Tried it, even on a hosted file. Works. So: When creating a new table, in FileMaker Pro 19, you always create a layout that uses the Apex Blue theme. When creating a new layout, you always create a layout that uses the same theme as the layout of the currently active window. This is not influenced by being the host or the network client of the file. What do you mean by that?

Thanks. I quickly scanned through this 45 minute video, to see if there was anything I could use. Very nice colour palette tool, I hope Matt will publish it soon. I would even buy it, as time is money. If I am not mistaking, it doesn't answer the question on the default theme. Stephen, you probably mean that the default theme cannot be set while the file is hosted, right? I did some more research and found out you can have FIleMaker use your custom theme as the default theme when creating a new layout. Not really sure what exactly the mechanism is, but it works well. Unfortunately this is no professional way of developing databases, and I always put the file on a server ASAP. BTW, even when hosted locally, creating a table results in a layout… in Apex Blue, even when you have a custom theme. All this is no big deal, it just one of those daily nuisances.

I would like to bump this unanswered question from more than a year ago. I cannot believe everyone is OK with this behaviour.

Can anyone acknowledge/confirm? I notice some strange behaviour with FileMaker 19.1.2 and also in 19.2… I have these files that are already hosted for years on FileMaker Server, gradually evolving from 7 to 19. Over the years those respective files got their own theme, and until now the behaviour was something like: "use the last used theme" or something. So for new layouts, I get Minimalist or the custom theme of the file. Now all of a sudden, I get this butt ugly (sorry) Apex Blue theme on new layouts, and it is very annoying. I probably have to take the files locally and force some new defaults in them, but anyone having experience with this?

I downloaded the "a" variant, and now everything is OK. Same license cert file.

Thanks Wim. I spent some time on my reply and missed your very helpful remark. I did install a fresh Catalina server with FMS 19 last week without any issues, I should have thought about this.

Same here. FMS doesn't list the files using fmsadmin, not even the sample file, but it shows it in the web driven admin console. When trying to open a file, no log entry is generated in the event.log. No error. No nothing. The fact that the web admin console shows the files, and the fmsadmin command doesn't, is a clear indication that something is completely off. fmsadmin set serverprefs RequireSecureDB=false is not supposed to be necessary when you first start up FMS. As I wrote above, even the sample file does not open. It seems a bit strange to me that FMS19 would not even open up the unencrypted sample file without entering some obscure command line instruction. Of course Wim's remark was towards the OP, and quite correct, allthough it seems like twisted logic to me to use the "secure" folder for your files and the serverprefs set to false. Allthough it is not mentioned in this post, I'm pretty sure this is an issue on the macOS server. This morning I tried to upgrade my dev server, and stumbled upon the same issue that kymie is reporting. I went to the correct ritual: uninstalling FileMaker Server 18, and restarting afterwards ( the fmserver httpd processes are not stopped when uninstalling ). Luckily this is a virtual machine, so I tried a few things, each time reverting the VM , but they all lead to the same problem. I tried removing the "FileMaker Server" folder completely I deleted the "fmadmin" group and the "fmserver" user after uninstall, because not doing so leads to a macOS bug after FMS install ( the Finder info bug ). It solves the Finder info bug, but not the FMS problem. I reverted the virtual machine to the "clean install" 10.15.4 snapshot, and upgraded it first to 10.15.5. I then installed FMS 19, so no upgrade, it doesn't get much more "plain vanilla" as this. I tried running the VM without SIP I tried installing FMS as root user instead of Amazing. Reverting to FMS 18 on the dev server, which is running rather OK on Catalina 10.15.5. I wonder if there is anyone who got FMS19 running with files actually opened on Catalina. Please tell. O goodie. So the license I'm using actually gives me the right to open 0 files?

Nick has codesigned the plug-in again and this resolves the issue. http://goya.com.au/files/beplugin/4.1.2/BaseElements.fmplugin.zip