Directing users to a specific record

[DBHawk]

Hi all. I'm new to the Forum and new to IWP although I've been working with FileMaker for close to 10 years (yikes! that went by fast).

I'm currently working on a solution where we want to e-mail people and ask them to fill out a short survey (5 questions). Setting this up was pretty straight forward and I even got the radiio buttons and checkboxes to display.

However, what I'd like to do now is include a link in the e-mails we send to people that will take them to a specific record (i.e., their record) rather than have them perform a search or something. Is this possible with IWP?

[Reed]

To direct IWP users to a specific record, you will have to use the Get(AccountName) function.

Before you send the email to the users, you would create an account and password for each of them in the database. (This could be done in the same script that sends the email)

The email sent would contain the username and password for them to access the IWP page. Then when they access the page, the startup script would take them to the record containing their specific account name by matching it with Get(AccountName)

[DBHawk]

Thanks for the suggestion Reed. I was hoping for a method that would allow me to use the Guest account for everyone. There will usually be at least 30 participants from each event and may be upto 100. Creating that many accounts would be more work than is reasonable.

Is it possible to activate a script that will find a record based on a key value included in the link sent to a user? Possibly a plug-in if it can't be done in FileMaker alone?

If worse comes to worst I guess I can have them manually enter a key and run the find, but it seems there should be a way to do it directly from FileMaker.

Edited September 13, 2005 by Guest

[Reed]

The only way to embed this kind of information in a query would be to use custom web publishing, but that requires filemaker $erver advanced.$

[DBHawk]

Thanks Reed. I was coming to that conclusion. Having looked into the new script steps for creating and deleting accounts, however, I'm now wondering if your original suggestion is the way to go. I thought I read somewhere that it is possible to embed user name and password information with a link, but now I can't find anything about it. Is that possible or has my imagination allowed me to go where it isn't possible to go?

By the way, this will be running on FileMaker 7 $erver Advanced.$

[Reed]

embedding a username/password in a URL only works in some browsers... several have removed this capability for security reasons, IE6 among them.

[DBHawk]

Just my luck. I'm guessing I read about the embedding account information in a FileMaker 6 book somewhere. I guess we'll either have to settle for a bit of user interaction (entering a record ID) or set up custom web publishing.

Thanks for all of your input.