Hello all,

I am a terminal Newbie that is trying to pick up the pieces of a conceptual FM error I made.

Sometime ago, I, with the very kind help of some you, managed to create an image db. Initially it was meant to a small affair and was designed to be a single file for practical reasons. What I mean in short is that I decided at its inception that I would copy the images into the image boxes. In the meantime, this little project has been used by others who turned it into this monster image DB that weighs in at 2gigs. Now I figure this not good & that I am looking for trouble.

What I did do at the inception as well, was create an archive with all the orginal pictures on my HD but naturally there is no relationaship between them.

So, surprise, surpise ... is there anyway of either doing a mass export of all the images into a given HD file and by this operation creating a relationship or is there a script that can automatically find all the original external picture files, erasing what it has internally and replacing it with the same named original as a relationship?

I hope this is clear.

Many thanks

See if this helps.

Thank you. This is a very encouraging start.

To erase my error completely, what kind of script could I add to reimport the exported files to the same place but now as a relationship?

No script is required. Just make an unstored calculation field (result is Container) that calculates the path to the exported image (i.e. the same calc used to calculate the variable for export, only the prefix is "imagemac:" instead of "filemac:").

Thank you. I will have a go.

Incidentally, could I use the same sort of script to send FM looking in a given folder for the same file name as it has in the container and then replacing it with a link? Can FM search a whole drive?

I am not sure what you mean. You can point Filemaker to an external file in two ways:

1. Insert the file into a container field as reference only*;

2. Define a calculation field with the path to file as the formula and Container as the result type.

Either way, Filemaker will not search for a file. If the file is not where Filemaker expects it, the field will display as 'file cannot be found'.

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(*) If you know (or can calculate) the path to a file, you can use a script to insert it into a container field - instead of having the user locate the file manually.