PDF not showing preview thumbnail

[James Gill]

I have supercontainers running on an install of Mac OS X (non-server) running Filemaker Server Advanced 11. Currently when I set a web viewer to a supercontainer file path I do not see a thumbnail preview of the pdf file, I only see the pdf file type icon. Do I have to specify the path to show a preview? After reading the manual it would appear that they should show up by default.

What could I be doing wrong?

[Smef]

SuperContainer will only show pdf previews when SuperContainer is running in stand-alone mode on a mac machine. You've got it running on a mac, but I would guess that you've installed it on your FileMaker Server (installer.jar) rather than running it in stand-alone mode (supercontainerserver.jar). When you run SuperContainer in stand-alone mode you will access it at the URL http://yourserverip.com:8020/SuperContainer/Files/

[James Gill]

I guess I'll follow up this question with another logical step. Is there any way to get Filemaker to display a preview image of a stored PDF file with supercontainer NOT in standalone mode? The ability to preview a PDF is very benificial for my purposes, and not having to make the user download a copy to their desktop would be awesome.

[Smef]

SuperContainer cannot generate pdf previews outside of stand-alone mode on a mac, as it needs the CoreImage service to do so.

If you need the PDF to show up in the web viewer you can use the RawData URL (SuperContainer/Files/RawData/...). This will download the entire document onto you user's machine, and assuming that their IE/Safari can handle PDF Documents, it will show the pdf in the web viewer.