It's been many years since I developed in Filemaker. Still have my FM7 Dev sitting in the original box on the shelf. Anyway I have just purchased 2 Windows 10 tablets for the purpose of running a FM solution (which I still need to develop), collecting field data and photos. I will purchase FM14 momentarily to start development. The slightly tricky part of the equation is automating the camera and image importing into container. I know FM Go does this, and I know the lack of this functionality in Windows has been discussed many times over the years. I also know that there's video screenshot grabber plugins available but they are not good enough as image quality is very poor without using the built in app image stabilisation or post processing.

I know there are many ways to achieve several of the steps involved and I will probably use either an external batch file or autoit script for managing the external camera side of things. Initiating the external batch file or script from FM is simple enough via several options so that's not a problem. I like the idea of using 360Works ScriptMaster to parse image files and select by timestamp, etc. I haven't played around with the plugin yet but if it works as I think it will then it won't be necessary to write to a txt file or anything like that. Of course it may also be just as simple to do the file maths and return names to FM via the batch file itself.

OK, so here's the one thing that I cannot seem to find an answer to. The FM script to "take photos and insert pics in container fields" needs to:

1. execute the external script (outside FM), (again easy to do)
2. wait while the external script runs (either paused or could be 2 separate scripts)
3. resume (if paused) or start (if split into 2 scripts) script which will insert the pic/s into container/s

Step 3 is the one that is causing me a bit of concern, how to trigger the script to resume (or start) from the external batch file or autoit script? I don't want to add another button that the user has to hit to finish off the process. I have read about the OnExternalCommandReceived script trigger in FM14. Would simulating the command in the batch file or autoit script do the trick to achieve step 3? Or is there a better way?

Cheers!

Your script could trigger an fmp:// URL to start a script when completed.

 

Ahh, thanks for the reply. I have never used fmp url before and had to do some reading up on what it does. Sounds like it might be a pretty good solution if I read correctly. use something like this:?

FMP://~/databasename?script=scriptnamed&param=...........

This would open up another way to pass image file names/paths to import back to FM too, using the parameters in the url. Am I understanding fmp url's correctly?

Cheers

The "old style" way of doing still applies too: use the FM ActiveX interface.  You would not be able to use a batch file but you'd have to use a VBscript or a Powershell script instead.  Not sure if AutiIt can use ActiveX.

 

As to the fmp url, Tony White has a nice infographic about it on his web site: http://www.twdesigns.com/index.php, it's on the lower left side.