FM7 and custom web solutions

[Susan27]

I am a PHP/MySQL programmer. My boss has insisted that I use FM7 to create a webbased application.

From my research on the web, I found that there is CDML tags that can be used with Web Companion in FM6. This functionality appears to be removed from FM7. Is this true?

Difficulties I am having:

- How do I have a password field? (with stars instead of letters)

- How do I insert a value into a field that does not appear on the layout?

- How do a have a drop down list that based on another table, but not show the ID (ie have a PetType table with id,text [1,cat][2,dog][3,fish] the Pet table would store the id value, but the dropdown ONLY shows the text)

- What is the easiest way to make a complex query? (SELECT child.name FROM child, pet, pettype WHERE child.id = pet.child and pettype.id=pet.type and pettype.text = "dog")

If anyone can suggest any websotes or books I should look at, I would appreciate it.

Susan

[Reed]

Given that FM server advanced is not yet released, you cannot currently use filemaker 7 to create a custom web solution. Once it is released, however, you will be able to use PHP to manipulate filemaker 7 data just as you currently can with filemaker 6.

Check out these pages:

http://www.iviking.org/?page=FX.php

http://www.fmwebschool.com/filemaker7.htm

Hope this helps,

Dana

[Susan27]

Anything that can be done now? My boss thinks that this should be finished this week. (Yep -- it's thursday) He thinks "Filemaker does all the work for you"

Susan

[Reed]

You can use filemaker's instant web publishing (IWP) feature. I've been using it and it is much improved since v6. Many of filemaker's script steps are supported. The major limitation is that only IE6 is supported for windows, and only IE5 and Safari are supported for macintosh. There is a pdf and some example files available at fmwebschool.com ....I think they want $25 or something like that.

Here is a file I've been working on for online scheduling. Just open it in filemaker, turn on IWP, and then open your browser to 127.0.0.1

The full access account is root with password root, and the user account is testuser with the password testuser.

The interface is still ugly and there will be some <file missing> messages in the layout since I didn't attach a related file which is currently too large to attach.

Let me know if you run into any trouble.

I'm glad your boss isn't my boss....

Dana

schedule.fp7.zip

[Reed]

In regards to your other questions:

1. I don't think you can have a bulleted password field on a layout in IWP. In filemaker, you can have a custom dialog that has a password input field, but dialogs don't work in IWP

2. You can use the set field[] script step to insert values into any field, regardless of its appearance on a layout

3. Drop-down lists of this sort currently must show the ID as well as the additional field. (In IWP, the second field doesn't even show up) The easiest way to achieve this would be to have the value list with the nonID values showing for another field (you could use a global field) Then have the ID field be a lookup or an auto-enter by calculation that gets its value from the relationship. There are other techniques for this in this forum and on other (pay) sites like filemakermagazine.com

4. Queries in FMP, (at least as I think of them) are done either by using find mode to reduce the size of the found set of records for a particular table, or by using relationships to filter the records that show in a portal. So if you have a child table that is related by a one-to-many to a pet table via the child id, and the pet table is related to the pet type table. You could have a portal showing the pets for a particular child on a layout representing the child table. This portal could contain fields from the related pet type table (I'm assuming here that each pet is of only one type). by doing a find in that layout, placing the text "dog" in the appropriate field in the portal (while in find mode), then the find would result in only records of children having dogs being shown in the found set.