Uploading a file from IWP to user

[SJM]

Hi,

We are trying to figure out how to upload a file from our IWP to the web browser client. We know that if there is already a file in a container field and that container field is on the layout, IWP will upload it to the user when the container field link is clicked.

Our problem is that the file we want is dynamically created, and we are trying to decide the best way to get that file uploaded to the client from the IWP.

The file in question would be, say, a csv or html file, like a report generated on the fly.

One idea that seemed promising was to have a separate process on the server that creates the file and sticks it into the container field by ODBC. Unfortunately, it now appears that it is not possible to write into a container field by ODBC.

Another idea is to have a separate web server process on the same computer as the IWP server (listening on a different port from IIS), that listens for links with a certain structure (these links are on the FM layout) and when such a link is invoked, it creates the file (using ODBC as necessary to get data from FM) and returns that file as its response to the web browser. Even though there are some security issues (we believe we can deal with), and perhaps some impact on the user experience, this is the best way we have come up with to get the file uploaded from our site to the web browser.

So, has anyone addressed this problem before or have any ideas of how to create a file dynamically and upload it to the client browser from the IWP server?

THanks for any help!

[FMWebschool]

Hi SJM,

Your problem is very similar to one that we have run into previously, more specifically with Custom Web Publishing using the XML interface. For this specific purpose we wrote a plug-in Grab-It which takes a URL (that can be supplied to it with ODBC) and uploads a file into a container field from that URL. The URL would usually be on the same server referencing the dynamically generated file.

Unfortunately, at this time this was the only we that we found how to perform this task. If you are using Custom Web Publishing with PHP then you could always just generate the links to the files properly using simple PHP, but IWP is the limiting factor in this equation.

In Kindness

Stephen K Knight

http://www.fmwebschool.com

800.353.7950 / 386.453.5843

FMWebschool, we bring the web to life

FX.PHP PHP XML MySQL CDML ASP