Server-side PDF creation

[Alex_Henderson]

Anyone been here before?

I have a FP7 file hosted on server advanced, with Mac, Windows and web clients all accessing it. I want a button that makes a PDF file, but printing through IWP is SHOCKING so I really want this button to "tell FMP server to make a PDF" and ideally name this file according to the contents of a field.

Lots of good posts about client-side PDF creation, but I need something more universal than that, but have never seen anything about forcing a server to do a task for you.

Any clues anyone?

Thanks

Alex

[QuinTech]

Hmmm... can your PDF writer generate PDFs with a certain name without user intervention? Maybe you could generate a PDF on the server at, say, MacHD:thisFolder:thatFolder:currentDate.pdf (or however you Apple people write it ) and then use the Open URL script step to open that on the client machine? The folder you save it to would have to be different than the one your FM files are in, since you never want users accessing those via file sharing.

J

[CoZiMan]

My understanding of this is:

1. The server does the lifting. (Makes the PDF)

2. You need speed.

3. Possible solution

1. There is a MAJOR issue with the pdf creation on the server. I've been in production environments where adobe's server software was used on sun equipment to keep from bringing the main web server to it's knees with what seemed like light loads. Remember, the server OS wants you to expand the file, not create a new one. The records were handed off and then returned completed to the file server. So if you want to experiment with the server side make sure you are ready for heavy lifting.

2. The client speed is an issue in IWP printing exactly because of the file generation issues associated with server based file architecture.

3. My possible workaround:

a. generate a pdf form for the different report layouts matching fields.

b. let clients download the BLANK pdf's to be filled. (do it one time)

c. generate a record - text based - to email as a(n) FDF for the user to select.

This would REALLY speed things off the server but limits the response to off-line.

My 2 cents.

[Joe King]

I've been playing around with a solution which is not pretty but it seems to work. First I install FMP on the server and/or on any machine with a 'real-world' static IP address. Second, I install Troi Activator on both machines.

When a user hits the 'print' icon it runs a script that triggers a script on the 'helper' machine, which in turn creates the PDF.

The whole thing works pretty good except the lack of communication back to the client. Right now, I have the reports being emails back to the clinet, but I'm thinking a CWP Publishing page may solve this problem...

[hennaquick]

I have a related issue. On a server (not Filemaker) we are scanning PDF documents via a digital document writer. In a FM database, we are creating records of each scanned document. This record contains a document_alias(calculation) that we would like to assign to a document once it is scanned.

I would like to create blank PDF with the name of the document_alias(via a script). Once that document is scanned it should replace the blank PDF. We want all available document_aliases to show to the user so they can chose the correct alias to assign to the current document being scanned..in order to establish a naming convention.

We are using a Canon CD-4070NW digital document writer and are considering the Troi file plug-in. The goal we want to accomplish is a link in the FM database that retrieves the PDF on our server. We don't want to store the document in a container in the database. We want a file reference to the server.

[mminer]

I'm doing something similar. Might I ask if you got this figured out?

Edited September 7, 2005 by Guest