Thanks. That’s the answer. I’ve been a programmer since 1982, and my company has just purchased Filemaker Server and the Clients. I now have to “re-educate” myself! This is a whole different world from PHP, or C++. Thanks for the help.

My next great discovery will be to find the function that “flags” when the contents of a field have been changed in a table. I believe that there is a function out there in Filemaker for this, just don’t know where.

Thanks again!

Bob

   Set Field [ My Field; $my_variable ]

Does that help?

Thanks,

Bob

I have not discovered the FMTEMPFM thing you mention. If that works it is a great tip. I’ll play with it and see what I discover.

Otherwise, it is possible to delete files in FileMaker without a plug-in. You just have to get an empty found set:

Show All Records
Show Omitted Only

Then do an export. When you do the export, if the file you target already exists it will be deleted. And since there’s nothing to export, no new file will be created. This is a hack, and may certainly stop working in a future version of filemaker, so a sanctioned technique would be much better.

Thanks for the tip.

It was my understanding that this dir was “temporary” meaning the documents I export to this dir would be deleted at shut down. I have not found this to be the case.

In order to have files removed (and thats at FMP startup not shutdown), I have had to preface the filename with the string FMTEMPFM. This seems to indicate to FM that this is a true temp file.

I haven’t seen any documentation on any of this and was looking for additional insight.

With the GetAsText function it works perfectly

1 Table “files”
1 container field “container1″
1 container field “global_container”

and here is the script:

Allow User Abort [ Off ]
Set Variable [ $file_name; Value:GetAsText ( files::container1 ) ]
Set Variable [ $path; Value:Get ( TemporaryPath ) & $file_name ]
Export Field Contents [ files::container1; “$path” ]
Insert File [ Reference, files::global_container; “$path” ]
Go to Field [ Select/perform ; files::global_container ]

First, when you use a container field in a text-like way, and the field contains a file, you get the name of the original file. For example, if you have a container field called Document and you make a calculated text field with this formula: GetAsText(Document) you’ll see the name of the original document in the field.

Second, the Position function can search from the end of a text value if you set the start to -1

So here is a formula that gets the file extension of the file stored in a container field:

Let(
   name = GetAsText(Document);
   Middle(name; Position(name; "."; -1; 1) + 1; 99999)
)

This will only work if the file is stored in the field. If you store only a reference to the file, you can use a similar technique. In your data viewer, use GetAsText to see what FileMaker reports about the reference to the file, and write a calculation to parse it as appropriate.

Hope this helps.

For example if I have several containers with different kind of files types (pdf, word, etc…) the temporary file should have the same file extension .pdf or .doc as the original file so that it opens in the right application.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Thank you for your tips and help.