Open a referenced picture

[AndyCan]

Does anyone know a good way to open a REFERENCED PICTURE? A referenced FILE can be opened with a double click, but i prefer to use a referenced PICTURE so as to have a preview of the first page of the pdf file. Note, the field will always contain a pdf document.

Perhaps there is a script step to open a referenced document whether it be a file, a picture or even a quicktime.

Thanks!

[bcooney]

see http://fmforums.com/forum/showpost.php?post/347990/

[AndyCan]

Thanks for your response.

Your technique works when using files, but not when using a picture. If i were using a referenced file I could simply double click on the container and the file pdf would open.

Do you know how to achieve the same with pictures?

Thanks again.

[Fenton]

Yes, you're right, the Go To Field [ select; container ] or double-click technique only works with files. But what you can do is create a calculation field which produces the "file" of a referenced image. All it really needs is the path to the image file, which it can parse from the image container field.

z_cFile =

Let ( [

txt = GetAsText ( image container field );

image_path = GetValue ( txt; ValueCount (txt))

];

Substitute ( image_path; "image"; "file" )

)

Notice that the only difference between the paths is the word "image" or "file".

The calculation result for this new field must be Container. It will show on the layout as the icon & name of the file. It will behave more or less indentically as if you had used Insert File into a container field. Hence the Go To Field [ select; z_cFile ] will open the file.

[ P.S. It would also be possible to reverse this trick, and convert an inserted file reference to an image. But that would not work with most other types of files, so not really useful.

What is useful (in some situations) is to just calculate the path to a file, from field(s) in the FileMaker record. This makes it possible to reference files & images without having to Import. Only works if your folder structure and file names can be gotten into FileMaker somehow.]