solutions wanted Storing & opening pdfs cross platform between win, osx, ios

[midtonlewis]

Hi Everyone,

I'm the production manager of a manufacturing company. We use a filemaker based electronic production system consisting of: -

filemaker server 12 hosted on a server in our design department.

14 desktop clients in each department running filemaker pro 12 , combination of win & osx.

3 x ipads running filemaker go

Attached to each job in our production system we have a pdf of the specs, dimensions of each job so machinists, inspection etc can open them when necessary.

These pdfs have to be hosted on our design departments artwork server (separate from the filemaker server), total combined file size of over 2TB so its not feasible to load pdfs onto each client / device. As our daily manufacturing continues, files are no longer needed and new pdfs are added when new orders come in, so having them on each device is not an option.

Now the problem -

I want to be able to natively open these pdfs on each type of hardware, be it windows, osx, ios etc. I currently cant find a way to do this.

If I insert the pdf to a container field as "store a reference only" then it will open on the desktop clients using the network path to our design room artwork server where the pdf is stored, which is great, but it won't open on the ipad. The ipad displays the network path as a ".txt" file. This behaviour is to be expected as the ipad can't share the artwork servers drive where the files are stored.

If I insert the pdf to a container field embedding it in the database then it will open on the ipad but not on the desktops (Is this a bug with filemaker 12 or am I being stupid) This realistically is no good as I don't want copies of the pdfs to be stored on the filemaker sever, just using it as example.

Is there a way to solve this so all pdfs open natively on each platform while storing them in the same place on the network (design rooms artwork server)

Many thanks

Lewis

[Wim Decorte]

FM 12 can do part of this natively through remote container data, but the files must reside on the FMS machine itself. If that is a deal breaker than your only real other option is 360Works SuperContainer.

[midtonlewis]

Hi Wim, thanks for your response, I did come across the 360Works SuperContainer and wondered if it would work. I'll look at both options and see what works best.

Thanks again

Lewis

[john renfrew]

Why not copy the PDF from the design server in FM on a short term basis, both as a reference AND the file

When the job is completed then delete the PDF from the container but leave the reference to the original file so it could always be viewed (assuming no-one moves it!)

The other option in FM 12 might be to use its capability to create a thumbnail (from the PDF) which of course can be quite large in size and store that in the container as an image and therefore accessible to FM Go. If they are multi page then using ScriptMaster with iText and ICEpdf to do this to single pages at a time can also be achieved and then store the images in a repeating field

[No_access]

Can you leave the PDF on the server.. then just use OPEN URL and open them in their browsers as needed?

[David Jondreau]

I'm not sure storage is the issue, how are you opening the file? The way I usually do it is export the field contents of the container field to the "temporary" folder. Get ( TemporaryPath). The contents of that folder get deleted when the application is closed.