Viewing PDFs in FMPs Web Viewer

[brian rich]

I have a web viewer window which uses custom web address to open a PDF file located on one of our network drives. Each record in the file holds the filepath to the PDF file, so as you move from record to record, the webviewer displays the PDF. We are using IE8 and have the Acrobat Plug-in installed so the PDFs render in the web viewer.

This works fine until you start browsing through a large number of records, when you suddenly get the message from Acrobat that the Maximum number of files are open and you will have to close some files before you can view or print any more. At this point the web viewer goes blank and ceases to respond - although you can continue to use Filemaker

The issue appears to be due to the way that Acrobat plug-in works in IE8; it appears that although you have moved to a different record and thus a new PDF is displayed, Acrobat still considers that the PDF of the previous record you visited is still open, so as you browse through more records, more PDF files remain 'open'. Eventually, you hit the file limit.

(We are trying to find a solution to reducing a 40Gb drawing file to a more managable size by storing the PDFs externally rather than as embedded PDFs as it currently has. We've looked at using Insert Object step to link aa external file, but the file path can't be built programmatically so that isn't an option. The Web viewer option seemed to be the only way forward but that looks dead too unless we can find a way to close the hidden Acrobat files.)

Has anyone found a way around this problem?

Thanks

Brian

[brian rich]

I have found one work-around.

Instead of moving from record to record, which creates a separate instance of a PDF in a web viewer, I've established a Self-join to the main table using a global field and put the web portal on a layout of the Self-Join. Changing this global field effectively causes the path to the PDF file to change. Since you see this in the same instance of the web viewer, you don't create a new instance of the web viewer when you move to another record, so you don't run into this browser limitation.

However this now makes a nonsense of normal navigation through the records in the main table so I think I will have to 'float' the drawing viewer into a separate window and keep it synchronised in some way.

Any other ideas welcomed

TIA

Brian