Filemaker 7 Pro and MySQL

[Light Speed]

I just purchased Filemaker Pro 7 yesterday and I am really impressed with the usability and power of the app!

My question is when I was talking on the phone with the filemaker rep he said that I could connect Filemaker to my MySQL DB.

In looking at the user guide it seems that all I can do is import a file to Filemaker.

I want to access my live MySQL DB through Filemaker and be able to use the live data with local Filemaker DB data.

Is this not possible?

I run an online store and all my order info, customer info, product info, shipping info, wholesale info is in my MySQL db and it changes all day long. I want to be able to use Filemaker as my local front end to print out invoices, packing slips, letters to wholesale customers, labels for orders etc. Will i not be able to use Filemaker like this without constantly manually exporting a file from phpmyadmin and manually importing that into filemaker?

Apps like navicat are able to access a remote MySQL db and manage the data so it seems that it should be easy to access a remote MySQL db through Filemaker and use the data with local data in a single layout.

[bruceR]

1. One way or another, to get the data into Filemaker you will need to import it and it will not be a live connection. But really, this is very much like a web interface, which doesn't provide a live connection either.

2. You can use applescript or other utilities to directly import the data, much easier than Phpmyadmin. The ODBC driver from Actual Technologies is excellent and moderately priced:

<http://www.actualtechnologies.com/product_opensourcedatabases.php>

[Light Speed]

Thank you for your reply. That's too bad. I was hoping I would not have to mess with exporting my remote db. It would be so nice to just open filemaker and not have to worry about an export of my remote data. Seems like this should be a "Feature" of filemaker by now with so many people managing mysql db data as well as filemaker db data.

When you say "applescript or other utilities to import my data" are you referring to importing my mysql db data into Filemaker? If so what would you recommend? Is there a prewritten applescript that I can download that you know of?

I purchased the ODBC driver last year from Actual Technologies for use with Excel so that's one thing down

[SlimJim]

There is a free plug in called shell available from

http://www.abstrakt.com/shell.html

which provides a command line facility and retrieval of data. On their website they have a description including php code of how to use their plug in to connect Filemaker to MySQL

http://www.abstrakt.com/festival.html

I have only just come across this plug in so have not done extensive testing but it seems to be very easy to use and the fact that you can pull the output of a command line into a field is great.

[Light Speed]

Thanks for the links SlimJim.

I also found the PDM Plug-in

http://www.clickware.com/products_plugin.htm

So I am reading up on both of these.

[bruceR]

Thank you for your reply. That's too bad. I was hoping I would not have to mess with exporting my remote db.

Did you read the reply? You do not have to export the remote mySQL data. You IMPORT it directly from the ODBC data source.

[Light Speed]

Sorry Bruce I am new to using ODBC drivers and am not familiar with how they function with filemaker.

Importing sounded as though i had to do an external step.

Is there a place on the web that details in laymans terms how an ODBC driver function together to access my remote DB. Is the driver just a gateway that allows filemaker to access the remote db directly or does the driver access the data and then filemaker accesses what the driver has downloaded? Either way Is the data downloaded, modified and then the remote table is dumped and replaced or is filemaker able to modify a single record without replacing the whole table?

I am curious because if i am editing one of my customers data and the customers table has been downloaded by the driver or filemaker for me to modify and then a new customer is added through my website modifying the remote DB then when i save my local edit and it overwrites the remote DB that new customer's data would be destroyed.

Am I just looking at the functionality the wrong way?

Sorry if I seems such a newbie but I am used to accessing my remote DB info and modifying it with navicat which does not require the ODBC driver. It just connects directly to the DB as long as host, username, dbname and password are supplied.

[bruceR]

1. You've been given several download URLs which wil provide more information.

2. Why would editing one record destroy another record?

[Light Speed]

Thanks for the urls.

By downloading a table this makes a copy of the table that becomes a local copy. The remote table is still live and is receiving new data from the website. The remote table would then be out of sync with the downloaded table so when you edit the downloaded table and then upload the local table to the remote host it replaces the remove version destroying the new records created during the cycle.

I asked if Filemaker functions this way to avoid destroying my data.

You don't have to be so cold. You were new to this once too.

[bruceR]

If you only want to read or update records that meet certain criteria, then that's what you do. It is not necessary to overwrite or delete/replace entire tables. How does ANY web interface to a database work?