Complete newbie here on this forum, so I'll apologize in advance if I'm asking something that is "common knowledge" or in the wrong sub-forum. That being said, I have tried searching for an answer, both here and the net, but my Google-fu is failing me I'm afraid. Hence this post.

I recently started working as the CIO of a government institution and we have quite a few FMP databases based on old scanned records. These digitized documents and their corresponding database "meta data" (for all those 19th century and early 20th century hand written forms that we haven't been able to OCR) are linked together. The data is in the Filemaker database, and the scanned documents are on a Windows fileserver. Each post in the Filmaker db has a link to the corresponding file, including folders etc. There is one file for each post. I know that this is far from an ideal set-up, but this is the way it has been designed.

Now, what I would like to try is creating a runtime version of one of these databases (a quite small one - about 21 000 posts) that include versions of the linked files. Ie, the runtime version should have the documents inside the database, and not as links to the external server. Is there an "easy" way to do this when I create the runtime or do I have to redesign the original database to include the documents before I create it?

We are using FMP Advanced v10.

Thank you for reading!

Now, what I would like to try is creating a runtime version of one of these databases (a quite small one - about 21 000 posts) that include versions of the linked files.

Are you sure about this? A database file embedding 21k document files is not exactly "small", I think.

Well, small in the sense that our other databases contain links to about 4,6 million and 2,5 million files respectively. The linked documents are not very large, about 10kb each, meaning that this 'smaller' db with embedded files would grow about 200+ MB which isn't terribly large.

Ok, then. Do I understand correctly that by "linked together" you mean the document file was inserted into a container field "as reference only"? If so, it's easy to convert it to embedded by:

Set Variable [ $path ; YourTable::ContainerField ]

Insert File [ YourTable::ContainerField ; $path ]

Or, if the documents are images:

Set Variable [ $path ; YourTable::ContainerField ]

Go to Field [ YourTable::ContainerField ]

Insert Picture [ $path ]

You need to do this in a loop for all the records in the new file.

Ok, thank you!!