HomeBase Software

Not specifically a FileMaker challenge today, this is an Apple Macintosh Automator/Shell Script routine. I recently had the requirement of generating a set of images for a large set of PDFs—I just needed the first page of a batch of PDFs converted into JPG files.

To get around the problem of having a many-to-many relationship you need to break apart the many-to-many relationship into two one-to-many relationships. Using a third table, commonly called a “join table”, does this. Each record in the “join table” would have the foreign key fields of the two tables it is joining together.

This idea has been documented before, (Using a Web Viewer as a Field) but I rediscovered it myself recently and thought I might have something to add. As was pointed out in The Support Group article, sometimes as a developer, you want to display a long chunk of text (anything that requires scrolling within a field) to the user, but not allow them to edit that text. Some examples might include displaying a block of help text, or a long software agreement. It is obviously possible to format your text using HTML to achieve this effect, but that can become complicated especially if you are not that good at HTML. Fortunately FileMaker offers a much simpler way to display formatted text this using the GetAsCSS function.

A while back, I did a blog entry on capturing Caller ID to look up FileMaker database contacts using a VOIP system. I thought it might be interesting to see if the same thing could be done with just a mobile phone, such as an iPhone or Android device.