Comments on: FileMaker 9 Tip#9: Web Viewers without the Web

By: Per

Per — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 10:36:49 +0000

Thanks, The Live HTML Previews is just what I was looking for!

By: Gido

Gido — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 10:56:56 +0000

I’m on XP SP2 with IE6, yes

For my own purposes, I’ve now changed my divs to go from left to right, to which at least the width range *is* fully controlable. However, the height still remains about 7mm and can not be set lower, whatever I try (even 0px or 0%) [I can of course still scale the WebViewer to a lower height]

I do some webdev too, and you would suspect that a div would act the same there and always show this “minimum height bug” during webdev, but that isn’t the case AFAIK, so I wonder if it’s a WebViewer problem.

By: Geoff Coffey

Geoff Coffey — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 17:03:09 +0000

@gido:

First, thanks for the correction on the missing head tag. Fixed

I don’t have a windows machine with me right now to test on, unfortunately. It would surprise me if an absolutely positioned div with a 0% height were so tall though. Do you have IE6 or 7 installed? To be certain, I never stop being amazed at what IE6 will decide to do.

I’ll try to find some time to test on a Windows/IE6 machine and see what happens.

Geoff

By: Gido

Gido — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 14:15:06 +0000

Wow, thanks a bunch, “but…”

…in the Dynamic Layout Displays example on PC, you will always see a pretty big default div height, even if you give it 0%, which makes it impossible to use in small WebViewers, e.g. in a WebViewer of 1 inch high, 5% will show more like 40%.

I wouldn’t mind converting a % range to pixels, but sadly low pixel heights convert to that same default height.

Anyone know a solution? Is that also happening on Mac?

I’ve already added padding: 0; to the body, but to no avail. Still hoping there could be a CSS solution. Not displaying the div at all can of course be calculated, but it’s the small percentages that are the problem.

And officially, you forgot a closing head tag here and there

By: aleksandar

aleksandar — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 12:13:47 +0000

He Geoff,

Thanks for Your great work. Have a question?

is it the way to grab (get) result of data URLs in Web Viewer ?

Like example I like to now today date in Hebrew date or other non gregorian date and I get it in preview tab (December 29, 2007 Saturday 20 Tevet 5768), but when I choose
GetLayoutObjectAttribute ( “ww_preview 2″ ; “content” ) in another field result is nothing - space?

Happy holidays
Alksandar

+â€œâ€œâ€œ

By: Jeff B

Jeff B — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 19:52:30 +0000

Guys, thanks for very useful information. The support team at Filemaker didn’t know how to view the contents of a field as html so they referred me to your site. Maybe you should add “& What Even Filemaker Doesn’t Know” to your book title.

Also, displaying the field contents is very useful for people managing an ecommerce site, to see what data will look like before uploading.

By: gessie

gessie — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 04:00:17 +0000

Geoff
You’re a champ - you answered all my questions exactly and then some! I’m currently in the field in Bhutan (research) so your videos take “a while” to load here (imagine me waiting with baited breath whilst the thing gradually appears!) It was as I was sitting there killing time - that I wondered “why am I doing this?” - and the answer came that they really are worth waiting for - they’re a perfect didactic device - better still of course over a normal connection line. Hence my question. My next question will be on FMP scripts or something - promise!
Big thanx
gessie

By: Geoff Coffey

Geoff Coffey — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 20:26:16 +0000

@gessie: I’m glad you like the video I do this on a mac, although I’m sure there are equivalents for windows. Here’s the basic info:

To record the actual video I use a program called iShowU. It lets me mark off a region of the screen and record it. I generally record at a high quality (Apple Intermediate Codec, 30 frames per second) just to be sure I get a good initial recording.
I use a program called Desktop Curtain to get a nice clean white background behind things without fuss. It just fills the background with a color of your choice, then you can put whatever window you want in front. This way I never have to shuffle windows around to get rid of clutter.
Believe it or not, when I want to do a video of Microsoft Windows, I still record on the mac. I just run Windows inside VMWare Fusion inside a window, and it records perfectly.
Finally, when I’m all done recording, I use QuickTime Pro to compress the video. I use H.264, medium-low quality, 8 frames per second, automatic keyframes, and millions of colors, and Fast Start - Compressed Header. I generally don’t have audio in these clips so I turn it off. I don’t have much guidance there.

When I’m all done, I have a very tiny, nice quality video that I just drop on the web page. Feel free to use the Contact Us form if you have more specific questions.

By: gessie

gessie — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 18:31:09 +0000

Hi Geoff
I come back often to browse over things again and again. I forgot to ask about something that I almost never realised was so well done - because it’s just there - but how are you creating these little video files? - like the customers notes in this entry. I have to create an FMP file that goes on show at a Museum’s education department - and I need some simple didactic device to show people easy things like how to make a search request etc. Your examples made me imagine using something similar - I’ve just not had to do it before.
Bit off topic - ‘mafraid - but thanks for any pointers!
gessie

By: Kaostika

Kaostika — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 02:45:54 +0000

Hi, I got you notes example. The webviewer won’t render in over IWP, so I changed the JAvascript to single quotes ‘ and it works great. So with you example you can set it up over IWP now.