I've just got off the phone to Filemaker technical support, who told me that it is a 'feature' that you can't edit a global field on a hosted file from a client machine; for changes to global fields to 'take', you have to make the change to the file locally, then re-serve it.

Aside from being the dumbest 'feature' I've ever heard, I was wondering if there were any workarounds for this issue, and what other people do when they need to alter the contents of a global field from a networked client.

Developer (client) 7.0v2; Server 7.0v1.

OK, this was discovered by Anne Verrinder a while back, on Server 5, so it may or may not work, as 7 is different. Let us know if it does:

One caveat: with FMServer 5.0v2, with the new feature that allows Defining Fields if you're the only guest, if you go in as a guest, and while you are the only guest you also open the Define Fields box, any global values you change during that session will become the new initial values, even though you are a guest. And, this only happens if you change the global values *before* you go into Define Fields. It's as if, when you go into Define Fields, FMP decides "ok, this must be the boss", and closes the file as if you were the host, thus resetting all global values to the whatever is current.