display image in container with path as a calculated field

[achitophel]

Firstly i would like to say that this is a repost of what i wrote on the forums at filemakertoday. I am double posting in the hopes that someone will reply to my thread here.

My issue is that i have a complex filemaker solution, and i want to make it simpler.

I want to take a static path and add a variable on to the end, then change the link in a container field to be this, and thus display a picture.

Our images are stored on our network, and i want to have our filemaker solution link to them, the images change frequently (We have print quality images and thumbnails)

the path is servernameimagesthumbnails

the variable is STOCKNUMBER

I want the container to have both of these concatenated together with a .jpg on the end, so it would be : servernameimagesthumbnailsSTOCKNUMBER.jpg

”servernameimagesthumbnails” & STOCKNUMBER & ".jpg"

Which would change for each record that i view of course!

So far i have succeded in doing:

Defined a field called "stock" which will hold the stock number (the bit that changes in each record) - set to "1234"

Defined a field called image which is a container with the following calculated value : "serverImagesFiledWeb" & stock & ".jpg"

This doesnt show any picture in the container (what am i doing wrong ?)

The same calculation in a text field gives the following :

servernameimagesthumbnails1234.jpg

(which is correct… copying and pasting this link in IE shows the picture)

Thanks for any help you can supply at all...

Jason

Edited April 28, 2006 by Guest

[IdealData]

AFAIK you couldn't do this at all in FMP5. Your field definition for the container must be an auto-entered value, however FMP will not understand the path reference as it is a Windows based path.

In FMP5 the only path references abailable were

file://path/databaseName for local files.

FMP5://netAddress/databaseName for remote files.

and these apply only to .fp5 files (notice - databaseName)

In FMP7/8 the file referencing is much more open and you can specify non-native FMP files, however you must still use only files which reside within the scope of FM networking. You can achieve what you're after but the files must reside on the local machine or the FMServer machine.

If anyone knows a way around this then please prove me wrong.

[IdealData]

I did a bit more research here.

You can specify a picture to come from pretty much any where, however the file referencing system limits you to specifying an absolute path name to a FMP native file.

[achitophel]

Thanks for the swift reply.

All i can say is

I am currently having a play with the Troi file plugin which looks a bit more promising.

[achitophel]

I got it working flawlessly on a local solution, but when i put it on the server, using Troi file plugin i get error 2020 ?

Any ideas ?

In both cases i was pulling the file from a UNC share //server/path.

Why does it behave differently locally than using FMServer ?

Any ideas welcome...

Jason

[achitophel]

Not sure why it didnt work at that time, but it is now working flawlessly.

[Vaughan]

Why are you developing in an old version?

As IdealData said, all of this has changed in FMP 7/8.