Filemaker Import Challenge...

[TomWoozle]

I am trying to use Filemaker as part of an online store solution (I have actually just taken over the project), and I am having a few issues. Hopefully someone can make some suggestions to help me out...

The setup is an online store that takes orders via a shopping system that we have purchased (which works excellently) and dumps them into a tab delimited file. On the same server we have Filemaker Server (an Mac OS X 10.2 XServe) running which contains all previous orders (and we use FMS 3 currently, so have many records to move over, hence the choice of Filemaker for the new system).

The way the developers who I have taken over from interfaced between a tab delimited file and FMS was to (at 2am each day) shut down the server (via perl scripts and the "fmserverd stop" command), boot up FMP and import the records (combo of Applescript and FMP scripts) locally, then quit the client and relaunch the server.

This is a horribly ugly way of doing things, and is made dangerous with the problems I hear about (and have already experienced) with corruption on shut down of FMS on OS X. Sometimes the server will just hang also...

I am considering ditching Filemaker for mySQL and writing a custom interface; however the company has already spent a lot on this solution and has been using FM for years so it would mean reworking a lot of legacy scripts.

Any advice or suggestions would be welcome! I would love to find a way to import the information without having to shutdown the server...

[ksquared]

Hi

I have a similar setup but with FMS 5.5 on OS X,

so apologies if this doesn't work with FM 3.

When importing data, I connect to the server using FM Pro from a client

machine.

If that is not possible for whatever reason, I THINK you can use FM Pro on the

server to access the database files while FMS is up, PROVIDED that

you use the Hosts button in the Open dialog box and then specifying the

file served by FMS. What I think this does, is get FM Pro to talk

to FM server (on the same machine) to access the files. Then,

importing should be straight forward.

From my limited experience, locally opening the files directly corrupts the files.

That's my 2 cents worth.

[TomWoozle]

Sorry, I wasn't clear -- the current system us using FMS 3.0 - the new one I am working on will be 5.5.

Opening the client on the same machine and opening via the hosts button doesn't work, as FMP just opens the files locally anyhow! I have thought about launching fmserverd as one user on startup, then logging the machine in as a different user without local permissions to the files. Only thing I could think of...

Thanks for your idea.

[Carlisle]

What I do when doing something similar is that I have a client machine that runs a file that I call "Updater". The server is running a file (let's call it "Records") that I need to update by importing a tab-delimited text file every night. Records has a script to automate the import. "Updater" has a script that runs the external importation script in "Records".

The client machine runs Updater's script every night with a scheduled applescript.

Works fine.

In actual truth, Updater calls a bunch of import scripts in a bunch of different files. Updater itself has no actual records, though I've thought about creating a new record that logs the date and time every time it opens to run it's script.

Regards,

Carlisle