Webviewer in portal

[fful]

Hi, I have two simple related tables: plants and images.

The "images" table has the plant name in a field, and an image viewed through a webviewer, with a record for each image. The images are on a server, we are using a calculated URL to display them.

Each plant has a different number of images, we would like to display them in one record per plant, in the "plants" table. When I go to the plants table, and create a portal to display the images, however, the webviewer from the "images" table only displays in the first portal record, not in the rest of the records. Other fields, such as the calculated URL, do display.

Does anyone know if you can use the webviewer in a portal, to display related records?

[Fitch]

You cannot use the webviewer in a portal, but you can use container fields. It can slow things down, watch out.

[fful]

Ah, I was afraid as much. The portal images are not the full-size ones, just 90x90 pixel thumbnails, about 16 KB each, but we may have as many as 400 plant records, with 3-6 images each, so 2000 thumbnails total.

When you click on a thumbnail, then you are taken to a record showing the full-size 500x500 pixel image, in a webviewer. I'll figure something else out for the thumbnails, maybe the containers will work as the images are small, and only 3-6/record, thanks for the prompt feedback.

[comment]

I don't think it matters how many of them are in total - it's more about how many do you need to display at once. Six thumbnails seems reasonable to me.

[fful]

Thanks for the comment. I was thinking that the bigger the database is, filesize wise, the slower some processes will take.

So, if I could use webviewers for the thumbnails, and display these in a webportal, the database would be much smaller than if I were to insert the thumbnail images in a container field. I would be inserting the images and NOT linking to them, to get around all the pathname issues with links.

We'll try the containers for thumbnails and see what happens.

I think I can also structure the database so that when you click on a thumbnail in a webviewer it could go to the full-size image for that thumbnail, if the container approach is too slow. I can put all the thumbnail webviewers in a single record, and not in a webportal, but I would need a different field name URL for each thumbnail.

Appreciate the feedback from everyone, it's very helpful.

[comment]

I was thinking that the bigger the database is, filesize wise, the slower some processes will take.

That may be true in some aspects, but most of the time Filemaker cares only about the stuff it needs to display. Besides, there's nothing to keep you from having the thumbnails themselves stored in containers as reference only - or even calculated from a textual path.

One advantage of container fields is that you can attach scripted actions to them. This is not easy to do in a web viewer - at least not Filemaker actions.

[fful]

there's nothing to keep you from having the thumbnails themselves stored in containers as reference only - or even calculated from a textual path.

I was under the impression, from a previous post

http://fmforums.com/forum/showtopic.php?tid/190691/

that the share volume had to be mounted on the end-user's desktop for the image to display when stored as a reference only.

Has this changed? We don't want end-users having to do this.

Also, in previous testing, I could not get images that were linked in a container field to display when viewing the database through IWP, has this changed also? We need them displayed. Or maybe my code was just wrong...

Thanks for your feedback.

[comment]

I believe the answer is yes to the first question, but I haven't tested this myself. Don't know about the second one.

[cellmaker]

Does anyone know why FM seems to have handicapped itself in this manner?  Resources are stored all over the place and still it's quite difficult to use these shared resources in solutions.  Nobody wants to replicate thousands of photos (and keep them synced).  

 

Web viewers are excellent, but as they aren't actually fields (and you can't designate a web viewer as a type of calculated result, you can't include them in portals. Are there any good workarounds?

 

This just seems very strange at this point.  Does anyone know why things remain like this?  (I'm using FM12Dev, btw.)

 

Cheers.

[comment]

Does anyone know why things remain like this?

 

As it happens, I think I have a pretty good idea. But how would knowing the answer help you?

 

 

you can't designate a web viewer as a type of calculated result

 

Not sure what you mean by that. You can definitely have a web viewer display a calculated result.

 

 

you can't include them in portals. Are there any good workarounds?

 

I am quite certain there are - but you would need to post a question (preferably in a new thread) describing the actual problem you are trying to solve. It will probably turn out that the "workarounds" are the straightforward solutions, while the web viewer is not.

[Lee Smith]

Does anyone know if you can use the webviewer in a portal, to display related records?

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