ecoplunge

It looks like you can send a file using the MAILTO url scheme, but it is not part of the standard and so is probably pretty fragile. The comments on this article discuss it, including the required syntax. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa767737(VS.85).aspx

Version 11 v2.

I've come to the conclusion that when using the FileMaker Send Mail script step on Windows it calls a New Message process from Outlook. It appears that FileMaker is then responsible for completing that request before it can move on about it's business thus locking FileMaker down. That's what I gather with my limited understanding of Windows anyways. I have found that I can get around this annoying behavior by using an Open URL script statement instead and using MAILTO. With that I can create a new message with a recipient, subject and body content and FileMaker does not get held up by the process.

Thanks for the input. Off to learn more about GEDCOM...

Conditional formatting is indeed a clever way to interface this since it is actually 'conditional' to the current view. This is not intended to be genealogical but I would be interested in learning more about GEDCOM. Has there been much work done in the FileMaker arena using GEDCOM? Any resources you'd recommend?

The relationships are probably only going to go to the level of grandparents but to me that would include the lateral relationships that develop in those three generations, cousins, uncles, etc. I find myself very torn here. The keyed relationships based only on mother, father, spouse allows for extremely little input from the user. For example: A family with 30 members listed in a theoretical database. To add someone new from this family only requires entering those three bits of relation information. The system can then immediately show you all relations for that new member and conversely from all other members too. That's pretty powerful. Doing that with a join record based system would require creating many, many joins. But then again a join based scenario is very extensible and different relationship types can be defined on the fly. Joins also 'feel' like the more proper way. But I'd like to have some opinions that go beyond feelings, especially since I've not really load tested either such system with large record counts.

Comment, interesting discussion in your linked post. Learned a new word: syndetic. Will have to use at my next dinner party. Still not convinced of not needing two joins and would like to know how to get rid of it if possible. Here's an example: Father and son. If I look from the father record I see a join with a relationship description of 'Son'. But if I look from the son record I see the same relation description of 'son' - obviously not desirable. With a double join father sees son and son sees father, each respectively through the two joins. This seems to handle the relationship well. Is there a way to get this asymmetrical relationship without double joins? How?

I am working on a system that requires an extensible representation of human relationships, i.e. Families. I have created, in the past, both models that use Contacts joined via relationship(join) records and direct key based relations: MotherID, FatherID, SpouseID. Both can represent very complicated relationships. The schema for a join record system is very simple but has high maintenance issues because of the double joins, e.g. Father-->Son, Son-->Father. The direct key way is neat because with just a few bits of information I can discover any related contacts by identifying how two contacts share keys, but the schema gets large representing the many kinds of relations (SQL calls are one way to reduce the clutter). So my question is what is the best physical model for a Relations DB that may one day contain a lot of records without bogging down, can be extended to handle new relationship types, and doesn't require crazy scripting to create/update relationships? What are the pitfalls? Is there another model I should consider?

When sending an email from FileMaker with the Send Mail command using Outlook for Windows 7, the message is composed but FileMaker holds onto control and does not proceed until the email is sent or deleted. My question is: Is this the normal expected behavior? On the Mac it generates the email in Mail, then the script continues leaving the composed email waiting to be sent. Am I missing something obvious here? Is there a way to create a single email or multiple emails and leave them up for review and sending after the rest of the script has run?

Thanks for the reply. I'm using MBS currently but there was no function that could grab the contents when it was a file. However I wrote to Christian at Monkeybread Software about what I needed and he hooked me up with a brand new function in a matter of hours. Now I can pull the file right out of the web viewer. Very sweet! Again, props to Christian for his lightning fast response and totally hitting the nail on the head!

I have a PDF being displayed in a web viewer. I would like to download that pdf to a specific location via script. This is on a mac and plugins are an option. History and caveats: This file is generated by a servlet. The servlet tracks the session of the web viewer and prevents opening the URL from anywhere but the webviewer. I cannot send the URL to Safari, use CURL (if that's even possible normally), scriptmaster's get URL, etc. because they all make their requests outside the webviewer and so the servlet refuses the request. I can, using the acrobat plugin, download the file manually using the save to disk, but the point is to automate this. I can also change the safari plist to disable PDF support forcing all PDF URL's to automatically download but then I will not be able to display PDFs within the solution for other purposes. What I would like to do is grab the current content of the web viewer, a pdf, and save it to a directory. I am hoping one of the uber-techies knows a way to get at that content.

If only the "Cancel' button for a paused script really did cancel - if it were labeled correctly it would say 'Halt'. If it actually did cancel then I could run a subscript to do the printing, let the user print or cancel, and then go about my merry way using the parent script to navigate back to where I need to be. I can't tell you how many clients look at me funny when I tell them that they have to continue to cancel while printing. It may be filemaker's shortcoming but it's me that it makes look bad.

Update: Found out the license conflict comes from Server not figuring out that I lost my connection. It takes up to several minutes for it to clear the lost connection. Just enough time for me to reboot or clear my plist... glad I spent all that time doing that. I really was lacking in practice.

I have a DB that is crashing on me, which may be a subject for another post, but I wanted to mention my observations from the crash. I get a license error after restarting FM and trying to open a server hosted DB. The launcher (local file) runs without a problem. I know that I can clear the error with a reboot, and that's always fun, but I've noticed I can also just trash my plist. I have seen it mentioned somewhere that this issue might be caused by my computer using a static IP. Any info or comments on this?