Free external toolbox plug-in, with AppleScript, Grep, Shell, and more...

[Simon Brown]

Beezwax has a new version of our bBox plug-in, which we are making freely available to all FileMaker developers. Since this is a technical forum, I'll jump straight to some brief facts:

What functions does it provide?

• execute AppleScripts within a calculation, with parameters, calling handler by name, etc.

• execute shell scripts, with the output returned as the function’s result

• execute AppleScripts, with parameters passing and return value as the function’s result

• filter text through a direct call to grep (no shell intermediate call), the powerful pattern matching command

• return the current time with milliseconds

• sort lines of text (optionally allowing you to specify a column or character range)

• find out what types of data are currently in the clipboard and extract them as text

• get path type (file or directory), file size, creation, modification and last date opened, POSIX permissions

What can I do with it?

• get an XML version of FileMaker script, fields, layout, and table objects in clipboard

• extract emails or phone numbers from text

• run perl, php, python, or ruby based scripts

• check if a file is present

• strip duplicate values from a return-delimited list

• present a dialog asking user to select a file or choose from a list of values

• determine if a needed type of data is in the clipboard

• execute a command requiring admin authentication

• time execution of scripts down to the millisecond

Includes an extensive demo file. Download it or find out more by going to:

http://buzz.beezwax.net/2009/03/19/bbox-filemaker-plug-in-easily-add-applescript-shell-grep-and-more-to-your-filemaker-projects

Simon Brown

Beezwax Datatools, Inc.

http://beezwax.net