An Introduction and my Project.

[hoek]

Hello everyone. My name is Aric Hoek, and I am a digital retoucher in Houston, Texas. I have owned my own business for over 6 years now, and I have accumulated a vast number of images that I have retouched. All the work I do is for professional portrait and commercial photographers in the area.

Pretty much every day now, one of my clients is purchasing a reorder from me. Which is to say that they want to purchase a copy of an image that I have already retouched. So, I find the image on CD and either email it to them, or burn it to a CD, or I make a print.

I would like to create a system that would allow my clients to see my data base online, which I just made five minutes ago, search for their image, and then initiate a download of that image.

So far, I have made a database, enabled web publising, and gotten it online. http://65.69.30.194 . This was very promising to me that I could even get this far! But I have run into a brick wall. I have gotten to the point of the customer downloading the image successfuly, but I have not found a way for the data base to notifiy me that a download has taken place.

I can't get the database to send me an email, or place text into a field, or mark a check box. Am I doing something wrong?

*Edit*

I wanted to add, that I am not looking for an online credit card entry system. All i need to be able to do is see a list of records that have had downloads, and how many downloads per record. Then I will enter in the credit card transaction manually.

[Anatoli]

Please hide your database so it will not be accessible from every computer on Internet.

RE: I wanted to add, that I am not looking for an online credit card entry system.

I'll suggest to go with some established professional system like PayPal.

Or program everything in Lasso/LDML middleware.

[hoek]

I turned off the password so people here might be able to give me a better idea of a solution.

As far as pay pal goes, we already have the credit card numbers of our clients on file, so will will be entering them in manually. So all I really need is a field to be filled in automaticly once they click the download button so I can see that a download has taken place. Then I will charge their card.

Did you have another way of hiding my database in mind other than turning on the password system?

[Anatoli]

RE: As far as pay pal goes, we already have the credit card numbers of our clients on file, so will will be entering them in manually. So all I really need is a field to be filled in automaticly once they click the download button so I can see that a download has taken place. Then I will charge their card.

PLEASE (!) do not do this. FM itself is probably the most insecure database system on the web. Show FM on web and everything is in public domain.

You'll be OK with Lasso plus excellent programing techniques.

RE: Did you have another way of hiding my database in mind other than turning on the password system?

Do not share them for multiuser, that will protect from direct connection FM -- FM.

Password system is next to useless -- see some of the posts on those forums.

[hoek]

Thank you for the advise on turning multiuser off. I think you may have misunderstood. I will not have their credit card numbers online, they are physically in our file cabnet under lock and key. And I understand that FM is an insecure way of doing things, but I only have 5 customers that will be using this system that I set up, and they wouldn't have the first idea of how to hack in or even the desire to do so.

I have no idea how to use lasso, and all I am trying to do is one simple thing. I just want to be notified when a download takes place by a field being changed to a different vvalue or by a sequence number changing. But for some reason FMP IWP is not allowing me to do those things.

[Anatoli]

If you keep out the CC numbers, then FM will be probably sufficient.

IWP is not flexible. Try Custom WP and get the CDML reference database. You may get pretty good mileage from CWP.

Also you probably don't need Lasso if you will not put CC numbers into live database.

[Unable]

Well, yes, you have turned things off. Your link does not load your home page (22 minutes and counting).

Regarding the "downloading" of the image, when I use Netscape and click on an image I am given a choice of actions in a pop-up which includes "Save Image As...". (You can get Anatoli's image above, try it.) So if I can get the image that way, why would I need to download it from your db? How will you track that action?

With my Mac I can take screen shots and get the pix that way. Will you know if your client did that?

No doubt there is something which I am missing.

Bon chance.

[Anatoli]

If the picture is only thumbnail quality and you have to do some database action to get the real one, then the picture download will be controlled by solution.

Unable is right, what is displayed in browser is already on my hard drive.

[hoek]

So, if I superimpose the word proof over the thumbnail, then this will take care of that problem.

[Unable]

It will help. How difficult will you make it get rid of with PhotoShop? The proof is in the pudding.

[Steve T.]

Hi, hoek! I guess it all depends on how trusting you are, how accurate your accounting has to be, and how computer-savy your clients are. You can design a FileMaker web solution that can have a db of your clients, a db of your artwork, and a db of a "download transaction/sale" -- kinda like an invoice db. BUT making it absolutely secure can be difficult and require additional products and scripting skills, as Anatoli and Unable mention.

I'm guessing that your clients are reasonably trustworthy, though, since they won't turn around and give away or redistribute what they get from you, and I'm guessing that you probably won't be of much interest to hackers or other outsiders.

Having said that, I think it sounds like a fun, profitable, project and that you should give it a try w/out tracking any confidential info. You can store your files in directories and give them names like Hotel_California_Eagles_0101.jpg. You can store PATHS to these pictures and have directory listing off and most folks will not be able to access them or easily guess them. Make your users log in first and then you can track each "download" by creating a record as an invoice that only gives them a clickable link to download the photo after a WARNING page that they will be charged. I may not have phrased it quite right, but you get the idea.

No, it won't be all that secure but you're not a public site, anyway, right? You offer specialty items to a select group of clients whom you can (more or less) trust. Good luck w/the coding, though... It always seems to be more than you think at the start.

--ST

[Steve T.]

P.S. Regarding your original q's...

I can't get the database to send me an email, or place text into a field, or mark a check box. Am I doing something wrong?

MAIL.

You can have FMP send you mail, but you need access to an SMTP server to do it. You can run your own or use your ISP's. I am in the process of testing the various mail tags and solutions now; the simple straight-forward hard-coded messages work fine but have had some trouble with more complex/integrated stuff. I'm sure I can hammer it out, though.

PLACE TEXT INTO A FIELD.

<INPUT TYPE="text" NAME="clientname" VALUE="[FMP-field:clientname]">

That's the code to display a FMP field inside a web field text box. If you use web design software (Dreamweaver, etc.), you can put your code [FMP-field:fieldname] in the "initial value" box/setting.

CHECK BOXES.

Ugh. Check boxes are not as straight forward as one would think. We are currently working on a solution and I will post it when we are done but there are several issues with check boxes (displaying checked check boxes vs. what the value is in the db; sending nulls/blanks for unchecking a checked check box, etc.). If you cannot wait for my soon-to-be-posted post, Jeff Spall has a good post on check boxes that we used as a base. He shows a clever hard-coded one that uses an IF as whether the box is CHECKED or not and he has a good valuelist based one, too. Neither was quite right for us but it put us on the right track.

--ST