Container Field not rendering PDF files

[Gary Hoffman]

My solution for grad student to upload information about their summer internship, including a PDF file from their employer, is not working well this year.

Last year, we were on FilemakerServer 13 and I built the student-facing layouts for WebDirect. The staff side of the database was accessed through FilemakerPro 13.

The container field does not store its data externally, but rather internally to the db file.

This year, we've upgraded to FMS 14, FMP 14, and, of course, the world has gotten wary of PDF files.

So, our grad students' uploaded PDFs no longer render in the layout where I've placed the container field. If the field is set to optimize for Images, I see a PDF icon and the file name. However, if I change it to optimize for Interactive content (PDF, MP3, etc.), I get an error message that resolves to this: You do not have permission to view this directory or page.

According to FM documentation, interactive content is rendered by the default browser on the platform, i.e. I.E. on Windows and Safari on Mac.

This seems to be new behavior. Does anyone else see this?

Gary

 

[troutstudio]

Same problem here. Cannot view PDF's in a container field. Is there a workaround?

[Mike Duncan]

This might have something to do with how the container data was inserted. If you insert as a file, it does not always play well when you enable interactive content. A possible workaround is to use the base64 functions to encode and decode it, and then it can be displayed as interactive. You can set this in one step, or even with auto enter on the container field to ensure it gets set:

Base64Decode ( Base64Encode ( table::file_result ) ; GetAsText ( table::file_result ) )

Does that work?

Mike