Running host application from a remote machine

[cteplin]

Hello,

I hope this is the right place for this question...

What I have is a ton of numeric text files that could be made into charts, using a seperate application, and placed in container fields in different records of my DB. However, the number of charts that this would create is prohibitively large, and so I am trying to implement a more elegant solution. What I would like to do is have a button in my DB that activates my chart-making program (Igor, from WaveMetrics) and tells it to create the graph and store it in a temporary file. I then have the script load this temporary file into the database. This way, charts are only created when they are needed.

I have successfully implemented this on the host machine. However, when a remote machine activates the applescript to call Igor, Igor starts up on the remote machine, not the host machine. This causes all sorts of problems. What I want to happen is for the remote machine to tell the host machine to run the chart-making program and save the temporary file on the host machine. Is there a way to do this?

To further complicate matters, I am hoping that this DB will work with Windows machines, which clearly won't understand applescripts.

Some further details: I am running FM6 on the remote machines and FM6 Unlimited on the host machine.

Thanks.

Chaz Teplin

[BobWeaver]

You can use the form:

Tell application "Igor" of Machine "Host Computer"

etc.

I don't know how you get a Windows machine to tell an applescript on a host computer to run, though.

[brianrich]

Suggest that you use some criteria to test whether you are running on the host machine or not. One possible criteria is to test the user name and reject if it is not correct.

If you have 'intelligent' users who might know about changing user name in the application prefs, then you could find a way of testing for existence of a local file which only exists on the host nachine,

To do this, create a FMP file with one field which contains a single record and then try and import this into another (but arbitary) file with the same structure in your database files, using the import function with error capture enabled. If this fails because your filemaker script can't find the file, then you know that you are not on the 'right' machine.

This is usually enough to prevent all but the most determined user from breaking your application...

HTH

Brian