Real Time Events

[coffeec]

I am setting up a system that receives an order and warehouse staff will pick that order. Is there a way to send a realtime notification to the warehouse staff who are logged into the same system in a different location that there is a new order? Like an event trigger.

[Wim Decorte]

have a look at the Troi Activator.

www.troi.com

[Reed]

The best way to trigger events on other computers on the same FMP network is probably to use the Troi Activator plugin.

Otherwise, you could just have a table with a single record that contains status information about orders, so that when a new order record is created, the flag in the status table is set to reflect this to all users. Once the warehouse staff take care of this order, they would reset the flag, and it will show no orders until another record is created.

Another option is to have the warehouse machine run a script in a loop (or use a method to schedule script execution) that would keep checking for new orders every minute, and then notify with a beep or custom dialog when a new order is detected.

Edited August 11, 2005 by Guest
added another suggestion

[Reed]

have a look at the Troi Activator.

www.troi.com

you're too fast for me... I didn't even see your post when I posted the same reply :(

[coffeec]

Hi Guys,

It just seems that every time I need to automate this database, I have to buy some plug-in and purchase a number of licenses just to get it to work. Isn't there anyway to get this automation to work without purchasing a product. With Access, SQL, Oracle, you can setup up event triggers to run this type of automation. Why can't you do something similar in FIlemaker? It is a database after all.

[coffeec]

Isn't there a way to call a windows vb script from filemaker to send an email(smtp script). If I were to do that, Does anyone know about a script that will accept parameters from filemaker (toemail and message)?

[Reed]

You can use the send message script step to call any application or script. I used to use it to call Perl scripts on both mac and windows, but then I started using the shell plugin (free from abstrakt.com) to do this because it can automatically return standard output to a field w/o importing from a result file as I had to do with send message. In either case, you just invoke a shell script with this script using a calculation, all of the command-line parameters can be passed this way from filemaker fields. I've seen something about automating emails using sendmail on OS X this way, but I can't remember where I saw it.

I just use SMTPit to send mass emails, and the send mail script step for the other users that just need to send mail one at a time. This way I only pay for one license of SMTPit

There's also a free script triggering plugin here:

http://www.softs4humans.com/

but it doesn't trigger on remote computers like activator, only on the local computer.

Or you could write your own plugin...

[coffeec]

I would love to write my own plguin but do not know how in Filemaker. I am new to this database. I can write scripts, I just don't know the syntax and how in Filemaker. If there are some resources on this, can someone please let me know.

Coffee.

[Reed]

There's a free plugin template available at:

http://www.24usoftware.com/

You have to own a copy of Filemaker Developer to get the project to build, however, since the necessary header files and libraries to hook into the calculation engine are only available from FMI. I still found it easier, for myself, to use the free shell plugin and just hook into shell scripts and the like, rather than dealing with C++ and the plugin API. It's just easier for me to "get stuff done" with Perl than it is with C/C++, even if it's not as slick and seamless as a plugin.

Another means of automation that's available for Windows are programming environments like WinBatch and AutoIt. These products can be invoked by Filemaker with parameters and can then do things that Perl and VBScript cannot do easily, like manipulating the GUI directly.