Any To Simulate oAzium Portal Filter Functionaliy?

[jrwhiteii]

Hello all,

In Mac OS 9 FM 5.5, I had a solution set up to manage my ebay auctions. It used two

plug-ins.

1) Dacons mail.it

(http://www.dacons.net/fmplugins/mailit/index.html)

2) Waves In Motions "oAzium Portal Filter"

(http://wmotion.com/portalfilter.html)

QUICK OVERVIEW OF SOLUTION

1) ebay_Items_For_Sale.fp5

- Related Field: ebay_item_number

- sample data: 1018045107

2) inbox.fp5

- Related Field: ebay_item_number

- sample data: eBay End of Auction - Item # 1018045107 (SCSI 10gb Drive)

Simply put, I used "oAzium Portal Filter" to create a relationship between the

"ebay_item_number" fields in each of my respective databases. It worked great as it

allowed me to look at email related only to a single item at a time when viewed from

the ebay_Items_For_Sale.fp5 file.

THE PROBLEM:

Today, I'm on OS X and am using a newer version of mail.it. When the mail.it plug-in

and the "oAzium Portal Filter" plug-in are in the "FileMaker Extensions" folder at the

same time, FileMaker won't even launch! This is a known problem that Dacon's

contacted Waves in Motion about a long time ago. To quote Dacon's:

"You need to ask the developers of the PortalFilter plug-in this question.

There is nothing we can do about it. They coded their plug-in in a way that

it occupies OpenTransport and other plug-ins do not have the chance to use

it.

We informed them half a year ago and a fix should be available. I suggest

you download the latest version of the PortalFilter."

Does anyone know of another plug-in or technique that I can use to accomplish the

same thing that I was with oAzium Portal Filter?

Thank you,

Jim

[cjaeger]

i don't quite understand why you would need portal filter for this. A simple one-to-one relation would solve this.

When you are looking at record with ebay_item_number =1018045107, only those mails should show in the portal anyway if the content of ebay_item_number is the same. The only thing to do is to parse out the item# of your mail:

2) inbox.fp5

- Related Field: ebay_item_number= LeftWords(Middle(email;Position(email,"item #",1,1)+length("item# "),20),1)

where field email holds sample data: "eBay End of Auction - Item # 1018045107 (SCSI 10gb Drive)"

[cjaeger]

I gather you used the "filter by exact words" function. That can even easier be duplicated by

Substitute(Substitute(field;". " , " "), " ", " " )

This gives you a list of all words separated by return. The first substitution eliminates "." at the end of words. you can add other Substitutions like ", " to filter out commas as well but that is not needed in your case.

[jrwhiteii]

Thank you Christian,

Your first example, though both excellent and simple, will not work for me because I should have provided a bit more information! The ebay_item_number field in the second database will always contain the ebay item number, but everything else will be constantly changing as email comes in from bidders, paypal, etc. regarding an auction. That is where the oAzium Portal Filter came in handy. I tried to keep my example simple by stating that the field "ebay_item_number" is the same in both databases. In reality, it is the subject line of an email in the second database!

I've never used the "Substitue" function. Knowing what I just explained, do you think it may be a solution worth pursuing? If I am understanding this correctly, once the line is broken down vertical through the use of the substitute function and return characters as you have described in your last post, the relation function will be able to isolate the ebay item number out of the results and form a relationship between the two databases?

Thank you,

Jim

[cjaeger]

> In reality, it is the subject line of an email in the second database

tzhought so, hence the name "email" for the field

1) first example should do if email subject contains the string

[item # <ebaynumber>] anywhere in the text. This is case-sentitive, though.

2) yes, you can build return-separated lists, and each line can match a key in another file

[jrwhiteii]

Christian,

This was too easy! I've never used the substitute function and have been using FileMaker for years! Here is my syntax:

Substitute(Subject; " "; "