External script to update records?

[cabsandy]

Excuse my newbie ignorance-I have 3 FM files, all large, which I need to update once a week with an updated text file (new customer records etc).

At the moment I manually do this-File/Import etc. I use Scriptmaker to automate the subtasks within this to quicken it up.

Problem is each file takes about 2 hours to update and I'd like to be able to let the PC do this at 2am, 4am, 6am each week by itself. Do I need to write some sort of external batch file (ideas welcome :-)) or can it be done within FM?

Thanks

Sandy

[McCormick]

Hmm... I don't know the answer, but I have some ideas.

You can have a script that will run either constantly or all night that starts with a pause. Set the pause to either a specific time (run it at 5pm every Friday and set the pause to 8 hours) or set it to loop and "wake up" every, say, 15 minutes. Whenever it wakes up, it checks the time (if Hour(StatusCurrentTime) = 1), then it leaves the loop and finishes the rest of the script.

Then a scripted Import step will work fine, as long as the source file always has the same name. I don't think there's any way for FM to calculate the name of the file to be imported. But that's easy enough for you to do manually at your convenience.

I'm not sure if you needed more to your answer, but I hope that helped.

[cabsandy]

Thanks for the reply-with your idea and my FM Pro bible, I managed to work out how to do this. Create 1 script for each large file and then put the last 2 in with the first one's script (each called as an external script) and it works fine. I plan to run them every 24 hours now in the wee small hours instead of every week. Thank you for taking the time to respond

Sandy