Opening file for the first time in Windows

April 11, 200520 yr

Hi everyone, this is my first posting here! I've search the archives, but if I've overlooked something, let me know.

I've developed a solution for the PC which installs onto the computer and then opens in kiosk mode. It works fine except that it prompts me for a username the first time it opens. I am a Mac girl, so I don't know if that is something that happens natively in Windows 2000 or something I can change in my solution. Anyone have any ideas on this one?

Thank you all in advance!

April 11, 200520 yr

Hi, Renee, and welcome to the Forums!

What is happening here is that Filemaker is creating a Windows Registry entry for the user name. Being a Mac type, you may not know a lot about the Registry; it's a sort of mysterious area. You can really mess up the computer if you toy with the Registry, but it is easy to jerry-rig it so that the user is not prompted for a user name.

I have attached a zip file that contains a registry import (.reg) file. Open the file in a text editor and find the text GPM. This is the name that will be imported as the user name; feel free to change it to "Renee" or "Program User" or whatever you want. Double-clicking or running this file will import a value into the Windows Registry. (NOTE: This will look very suspicious to your anti-virus program, and you may need to turn AV off before running it.) Once it has been run and that value has been inserted, the user will not be prompted for a user name.

There are several ways to have this run automatically before the user uses the solution for the first time. If you give us more details about how you are distributing your application, we may have some ideas on how to do this best.

HTH,

Jerry

FM_User_Name.zip

April 11, 200520 yr

Author

Hi Jerry-

Thank you so much for your quick response! I am using VISE 3.6 as an installer which autostarts off a CD. I initially designed this to be run in kiosk mode, but my client changed their mind and it will open in a normal Filemaker window. I am setting it up to run in Windows 98-XP. I am designing this product for a client who will be duping the CD and selling it to their customers, so potentially there could be hundreds of different users.

Thank you again!

-Renee

April 11, 200520 yr

I'm not familiar with VISE, but see if it has options for creating/modifying registry entries. The usual syntax for the registry key you will want to edit is:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareFileMakerFileMaker Pro6.0Preferences]

and the name of the value is

User Name

You would set that value data to "username" or whatever. In kiosk programs, i don't believe this value serves any purpose at all.

If you confine yourself to the area of the registry specified by the path above, you can do a little bit of playing around without harming anything. But if you lock up the OS by editing the registry, i never met you.