I'm using 8.5 Advanced and 9.0 Advanced on a Win XP platform.

I'm about to move my solution onto a commercial hosting site, and I need to make some changes. Currently, I store graphics in external files and only save the file path/names in the data record. Somewhere along the line FMI added 'Export Field Contents' (anyone remember which version?) that would allow me to store the graphics on the record, and then get them out.

If I store them on the record, I'd have to export them to an FTP site. How (remember the DB will be on a hosted server) do I do that? Should I not store them in the records and put them directly on the FTP site? Then, to display the graphics, I assume I'd use the Web Browser. The rest of the data would be exported as a CSV datafile. Can that be done directly to an FTP site? How? In total, there might be 4,000 JPEGs, each about 50K.

Since I've never dealt with a server, would having my own server (or dedicated, commercially hosted server) make moving files around any easier, ie not needing an FTP site to write the data to?

Steve

I'm not sure how you might accomplish all this with FM alone. By adding SmartPill (http://www.scodigo.com) you could easily interact with your ftp site.

SmartPill adds php to the FM calculation engine so you would be able to do many thousands of other useful things, including scale and manipulate your image files.

Regards, Don

I just saw a demonstration of a Java-based app that works with FileMaker, SuperContainer. It is not very expensive, and takes over a whole lot of the work out of dealing with images (upload, download, create resized files, resize on the fly), using either a container field or web viewer for display. It is meant to be run on your file server machine; Mac, Windows, Instant Web Publishing.

http://www.360works.com/supercontainer/

Steve,

I do something very similar to what you're wanting to do right now and I use SmartPill to do it. I posted a number of Custom Functions on Brian Dunning's website for doing FTP uploads, creation of file paths, etc. Check them out - they might prove useful.