Routing

[Phillip Holmes]

I have a client that supplies goods to a large amount of endusers. They have asked me to investigate the creation of a FM DB that can create a run sheet for the drivers.

I have no idea on how to approach this type of thing, any help would be great.

[Inky Phil]

That is a fairly broad request for help. Any chance that you can narrow it down a bit?

Phil

[Fenton]

You might want to upgrade to FileMaker 9, to get the Web Viewer object, which is basically a little web browser in FileMaker. You can then interact with map sites like Google, which can get directions to multiple points, using addresses within FileMaker. You would then "scrape" that info, using FileMaker calculations, from the html source returned. There are a few examples around.

There is an even more powerful method, using the Google or Yahoo API, to query and return xml, which can be transformed via an xsl stylesheet, to import directly into FileMaker. There is a (huge) glitch however (besides learning how to do it), which is that these APIs have licensing restrictions prohibiting such use for commercial reasons (or building a commercial application which does so), unless you pay them big bucks (minimum $10,000 per year in Google's case). I'm not a lawyer, nor can afford one, so I'll leave the details to those with more legal knowledge. I would love to hear that I'm wrong. I have read that they are reconsidering this, and may eventually come out with "per use" licenses. But I wouldn't hold my breath. BTW, they require a unique ID to use these services; they will know who you are.