Dialing the Telephone on Mac

[RichardAustin]

Since dialing is broken in FileMaker 7 for the Mac. Does anyone have a good solution for dialing?

[matt d]

First download ABDialer at http://www.macronsoft.com/pages/en/abdialer.html

Now, once you have installed ABDialer make FileMaker perform this apple script (edit it of corse, and calculate the phone number):

(*

Dial a phone number from AppleScript.

[email protected]

*)

set phoneNumber to "2299340"

tell application "ABDialer"

dial phoneNumber

end tell

try

on error number error_number

if the error_number is -128 then error number -128

beep

display dialog "Unable to dail the phone."

end try

Keep in mind ABDialer is shareware, so if you like it, buy it.

[RichardAustin]

I presume that there is a way to set the phone number other than as a scripted constant. Are there other open source solutions that are perhaps more scriptable?

[Fenton]

I think there's some misunderstanding here. Matt's script was just a basic example of how ABDialer works (sounds good, not used it yet). If you used this with FileMaker you would pull the value from a field. Assuming you're on a record, and the Phone field is on the layout, this is what would work from Script Editor:

tell application "FileMaker Pro"

set phoneNumber to cell "Phone" of current record

tell application "ABDialer"

dial phoneNumber

end tell

end tell

If the above is in a Perform AppleScript step, then remove the beginning and ending lines (not needed in FileMaker; it knows who it is). You may want more steps to target a specific layout.