Am I using Filemaker Correctly????

[Melis]

I work for the Vanished Children's Alliance a missing child Non-Profit www.vca.org. Using Filemaker Pro 6 we host a database which is searchable from our website that contains the information about all of our missing child cases and their printable posters. We do this to help law enforcement generate leads and sightings which help to recover these children by allowing the public to have access to the photos and descriptions of each child and the capability to print and help us dstribute the posters. Using Filemaker Pro we are able to keep the database up to date through Web Companion, unfortunatly we have come to find out that this version only allows 10 users (or ip addresses) to log on a DAY! Since the data is only updated once daily, i was wondering if we have to share the information in that manner, or if the filemaker data can be integrated in the to website in some other way. Any suggestions or comments would be GREATLy appreciated.

Here is the address to our database

http://66.166.232.210/Directory.htm

[Ender]

In order to host to more than 10 web sessions per day, you will need FileMaker Unlimited. It may be hard to find nowadays, now that FM7 is out. If you're thinking about upgrading to FM7, you'd need FileMaker Server 7 Advanced to do host more than 10 (or is it 5 now??) sessions in a 12 hour period.

Both of these products are fairly expensive, but you may be able to get a non-profit discount ordering through FileMaker directly.

[SJM]

Wow, what a great feature that they protect you from having more than 10 connections per day. Sorry, sarcasm... I'm used to open source software where that kind of anti-customer arbitrary restriction is completely alien.

Anyway, speaking of open source software, if you can recruit the help of the right person, you could probably implement a web proxy or cache in between your Web Companion and the Internet. For example, you could have the Squid cache program be one of your 10 clients for the day. Each day Squid can pull all the pages from the server with that day's updates. Then have Squid listening on the Internet-facing port and serve all the pages from the cache. This should be pretty easy to implement because you only need to provide read access to the database from the web. It would be much faster than serving directly from FileMaker, too.

[Melis]

Wow! Thanks! Now to figure out how to implement that. Is there software we could buy? Or are we going to have to find a computer savy volunteer to come in and do it? I have limited Filemaker knowledge but i'm relentless, determined and I learn quickly, do you think I might be able to pull it off? Could you steer me towards some online information regarding this process? Thank you so much !! i greatly appreciate you taking the time to respond.

[SJM]

You don't need to buy any software. What you need first and foremost is a technically saavy volunteer who can set up major open source packages such as Squid cache or Apache webserver. You could try posting something on craigslist or one of probably dozens of classified or related websites for your area (San Jose?).

What I said above was just one example. Now I think it might be easier to skip Squid and use a different scheme. It can be divided into two basically independent parts.

1. A program to crawl the web interface given by Web Companion once per day (after the update) and save all of the web pages with relative links preserved, etc. For example the GNU wget program (use Google, all this stuff is Free Software) can recursively rip down part of or entirety of a website using this command:

wget --recursive --convert-links --page-requisites --relative <url of web companion>

This would save all the pages as static HTML files in a folder, provided the pages are linked to from the main page that you give as the last argument to wget. (If it doesn't work this way, which it might not - I've never used Web Companion - you will need a more sophisticated script to generate all the HTTP GET query parameters. Don't worry it isn't necessarily as bad as it sounds.)

An alternative to wget might be something I recently came across. Search Google for pyFileMaker. This could be used by someone who knows or wants to learn Python. But I haven't used it myself.

Then you can simply copy the folder to a location accessible from your main static website and let the webserver that serves your site take care of serving the pages from the database.

Each day, crawl the Web Companion interface again, saving the latest updated versions of each page, and then copy the whole set of pages over to the web server.

There are lots of possibilties, you just need to get someone who knows how to set up and use Apache etc. Try local university. (Even if you don't actually need to set up Apache, someone who knows how to will typically have the kinds of skill and knowledge to set up something workable for you.)

And one more thing, no offense but your website is bad. I mean bad style, appearance, and HTML code. You might try to get someone to help you make a better one. Hell, I'll ask my brother if he wants to do it. We certainly support helping vanished children...

[QuinTech]

a technically saavy volunteer who can set up major open source packages

And they're a dime a dozen, right?

Sorry for the (return) sarcasm, SJM, it just rankles me when people try to compare commercial software with free open-source software. They're two different things for two different markets. There is a reason why MySQL, for example, can be obtained for free, and FileMaker cannot: You don't need to be a programmer to use FileMaker. (And I don't equate "programmer" with "someone who has a paper cert or lots of letters behind his name," but you know as well as I do that the vast majority of people wouldn't know what to do at a command line, let alone how to build a MySQL database.)

To suggest that it is easy to set up such a caching program is a little disingenuous in a forum like this (though maybe not on a similar forum for an open-source package). Honestly, if you have a volunteer who can do such a thing, don't you think you'd be better off scrapping Filemaker and going 100% GNU?

Melis: SJM has great ideas, but if you get into this, prepare yourself for a second career as a programmer. This takes you out of the FileMaker world (easy to use right out of the box) and into some pretty heady stuff. If you want to keep the FM ease-of-use, go with Filemaker Unlimited.

Just my 2c.

Jerry

[Melis]

Thanks Jerry, I've been doing some research and I have one more question, What about a program called Lasso? I read a bit about it but i'm not sure if it will do what we need it to. (The price also plays a big part)

Thanks again to all of you!

[QuinTech]

Melis, I don't really know too much about Lasso, but I know that it is a very FM-friendly tool for delivering data to the web. In fact, there is even a forum about it on this site. That might be a good place for you to start.

J

[Melis]

Sorry about the delay in my response, I'm in the middle of learing about Lasso. Thanks again !! ~Melissa

[Steve T.]

Howdy, M! Nice to see you here, too. This is actually the best place to go for FM help so you can probably skip the other place (ahem).

Lasso has a long history with FileMaker and it was Lasso technology used as CDML in FileMaker Pro's first custom web publishing option (v.4-6). FM7 changed things and dropped CDML so that left a lot of folks in trouble. Some went ahead and upgraded to Lasso from CDML. Lasso uses similar tag-based scripting but is much, much more powerful than CDML was. If Lasso were free, I would have probably gone that route instead of switching to PHP/MySQL.

Lasso works with other databases other than FileMaker Pro, too. And as QuinTech mentioned, we have a forum just for Lasso/CDML (where I used to be a regular).

Oh, and I think of database web service as having 3 parts: (1) database, (2) web server, (3) middleware. FM Unlimited could do all 3. Lasso is middleware. You can have combinations of any of these, and even more. Hope this helps some, though!

--ST

[petfood]

We are going through the very same thing... from my point of view Filemaker are missing a great opportunity. Many of us are much farther behind the tech savy in using the web and development tools... to make the leap from here to FM7 advanced is too large in one step..

We were just on e-bay bidding for a version of FM Pro 5.5 Unlimited with the web connector and the final price was over $725.00... Filemaker should consider selling unlimited licenses for those of us who want to use the ease of connectivity they give us a glimpse at without having to learn new languages despite the power they may hold...

Just an opinion from another frustrated user...

[Melis]

That is so funny ! We bid on the same item on Ebay but stopped at $400 because I had heard about Lasso. What a small world! Okay so what version of Lasso should I buy? I'm using FMP 6.0

[petfood]

That is funny... doing more investigation though I think the use of Lasso might need to be re-thought... it would seem that Filemaker once again seems able to beat up the customer... view this link and you will see what I mean...

http://filemakeradvisor.com/doc/08273

... but it does indicate the version of Lasso that can be used...