ASP.NET, ODBC, and Filemaker Container fields…

[Ryan K]

Hello –

I program and maintain a handful of intranet web-based applications. These are all built using ASP.NET and run on IIS on a Windows 2000 server. I have been handed a couple of Filemaker databases with the hopes that I can utilize their data in our applications, while keeping them in Filemaker format.

It appears that this is possible using the ODBC drivers that come with Filemaker Server. Where I’m concerned however, is that these databases utilize container fields that store a variety of document types. (Mostly MS Word and Adobe PDF.) It is hoped that the files in this database can be available for a user to download through the web application.

There doesn’t seem to be a lot of information available on this subject. The ODBC developer’s documentation that comes with Filemaker Server 7 briefly mentions:

“When you share a database file as a data source via ODBC, FileMaker converts the contents of container fields to JPEG data.”

So does this mean that what we want to do is possible? Or are there limitations that this would only work for JPEG picture data?

I’m curious if anyone has experience with this? (There is almost no mention of this topic on these forums – so I’m guessing that it’s simply a need that doesn’t come up very often.)

Thanks –

Ryan K

[Wim Decorte]

check out http://fmdotnet.sourceforge.net

It uses XML instead of ODBC. I've used it to create ASP.NET pages including pictures from containers. Haven't tested what the XML looks like when you put PDFs or Word Docs in a container but I can certainly check that.

The reason why I'm using XML instead of ODBC is that I don't like the ODBC drivers very much. FMI outsourced them to DataDirect and getting support is a ping-pong game sometimes.

[Ryan K]

Thanks for the quick response Wim, and thanks for bringing this to my attention. I'm going to start trying this out shortly. That's quite handy that this has been released for beta just a few days ago. I'll report back here with my findings.