LiveStream - 07.29.20 - FileMaker Ultimate Free Plugin - BaseElements - Nicholas Orr

The most downloaded and used FileMaker plugin. Its like a Swiss Army Knife for your FileMaker customer App. If FileMaker Pro doesn’t have a feature, this probably has you covered. Especially for developers. Nick Orr presents the latest on this valuable tool.

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LiveStream - 07.29.20 - FileMaker Ultimate Free Plugin - BaseElements - Nicholas Orr

Hello everyone richard carlton here i'm here along with you welcome to an awesome day at fmtrain. tv where we're going to work with you to teach you how to build great filemaker custom applications and today is just another awesome day in fact today's wednesday once again we have nick orr from goya nick is awesome yesterday he covered base elements kind of the diagnostic tool and then of course he always confuses me so then today is on the base elements plug-in which i can say definitively is a de facto most popular uh filemaker plugin in the world in fact claire should just bundle it with filemaker pro every time you install filemaker pro should just auto install base elements it would it would solve so many problems once again we are broadcasting high definition so we've already been like launched into the weeds on um various topics we're broadcasting youtube twitch and discord for some of you daily filemaker training is on this channel we

greatly appreciate everyone comes by here definitely support the channel though how you do that you can support myself you can all support nick definitely come to fmtrain. tv buy one of our bundles we greatly appreciate how we afford to pay for all this life training because it's not just me it's also the production engineers the people edit the video because we just don't throw this stuff on on you know it's stream to youtube and these other services but after that we have to we clean them up okay so then ken uh ken who was not here yesterday he's uh giving us a live testimonial here he says watching the recording from yesterday based on what nick shared i then used the trial version and managed to find all sorts of things in my current project that needed fixing most of those i never would have found or even thought about looking for it thanks to richard and the show and nick with base elements thanks to

nick for a great tool thanks to for the discount code we'll be buying the annual license after today's show uh nick are you ready to present your awesomeness yeah certainly i i guess the starting point is probably just to explain why we ended up with a developer tool called base elements and then a plug-in also called base elements and originally i actually never intended to sell a plugin and so we used in base elements and third-party plugins but i needed one to do files and i needed one to do dialogs and i needed one to do urls and i needed one to do emails and so i would have had four had to sort of manage four different plugins i thought it was a waste i asked around a few of the existing plugin developers and said could you write one for me they all sort of weren't really interested um uh the i i originally got one of the 360 works guys so i know richard

you're a big fan of 360 work stuff um if you've used their super container plug-in it has like a generic function and then it has a get clipboard function and the reason that's there is because i paid them to put it there because i was considering using that as well so um in the end i got someone to write it for me and i thought i'm not really interested in doing anything with this i'll just open source it and give it away because it's like three functions um and then people found it interesting and i kept finding more things that i wanted to do with it so we just get that into it and adding to it and at some point i thought gee you know maybe i should come up with a name for it and then filemaker contacted me to say hey we're using the plugin in our next round of uh training materials so you're happy for us to do that yep but now i

can't rename it because they're going to be out here in the world you know in 18 months time and then exist for the next you know three or four years so you know it's stuck so yeah so that's that's the naming's history so yes it is confusing there is base for developer tool and base elements plugin is intended to work with the base elements developer tool to do all its magic but it is a free plugin so it's open source for code up on github you can download it and compile it yourself um you can stick it in any number of your solutions you don't even need to register it you don't even need to contact me to say that you're using it i don't care you can do it you can put on a thousand computers you can put it on your own it doesn't matter um i did want to just go into a bit of detail about plugins and how they work for people that

sort of don't understand if you're not if you've never used a plugin before some of this can be a little bit confusing so the plugin essentially there's a plug-in file um i'll show you this little folder this file here so this has got a set of container fields just one for each platform so these are the plug-in files themselves um and they get installed in various places in filemaker pro but also in filemaker server so if you have a look on phonak pro you have a folder called filemaker in your application support folder on the mac there's a similar one on windows and your plugin goes in the extensions folder in there but it can also go in this extensions folder it can also go in this folder here and it can also go under shared as well so there's all sorts of weird places in older versions of filemaker as well they used to have a folder at the root level so here's your

application here's an extensions folder as well so there's all this weird hierarchy of what you can where you're getting stored install plug-ins locally situations and i'll show you in a sec a way to get around that so essentially whenever you've got one of these plugins installed and you can tell what's currently installed up here here's base elements 4. 14 that's installed that can reveal the particular folder so that's as you can see it says reveal folder even though it's saying it just so you know everyone can see that if you want to clear that one out of the way yep cool beauty so so 414 is the is the current release right now uh four one four hasn't been released yet four one two is the one up on the website and we're just doing a couple of other builds of four one three to get that out um but yeah four one two is the latest one up on my website um so plugins when they're

installed on filemaker pro in the application various you know application library folders they then add functionality to filemaker you can also install plugins on filemaker server but the confusion is a plugin on filemaker server doesn't add any functionality to the filemaker pro client so every if you have a filemaker server and you've got 30 users and you want to be able to use plugin functions in your solution then every one of those 30 users has to have the plugin installed and if you're a developer like me i use you know different plugins for lots of different things um if i install the base elements plug-in for one of my solutions then the other solution can potentially access those functions as well but again they have to be programmed in and i'll show that in a sec so you need to install uh in every client that's going to access the functions that you're going to use on the server the reason for having them on

the server is that you can run scripts on the server via perform script on server and via script schedules so if you if those scripts that you're running use plugin functions then you also need to have the plugin installed on the server so there's a you understand there the difference between those two and the easiest way you can copy this physical file into the folder but i would recommend that you never do that and instead use a script step so install plugin file and you have to pick the different ones obviously you've got different ones for different platforms here install plugin file will do exactly what you want you need to separate between mac and windows this is allows for older versions as well so previously there was 32-bit versions and 64-bit versions the plug-in file on mac was a bundle so it was both 32 and 64 but base element these days is 64 bit only so this will be version four this will

be version four the linux one will also be version four this 32-bit one will be 3. 38 i think it was because that was the last 32-bit version we did these days and these things here this is just his platform is cloud are just custom functions that i wrote so we also now have a beta linux server so the adiab aws cloud was based on linux um but we now also have a beta uh filemaker server for linux so that would be really cool we can run plugins here and are the differences between what works yeah i was okay there you go you're just actually i stu i interrupted you and you were gonna answer the question that was just asked are the are the features the same between the mac and windows and i guess linux uh between mac and windows absolutely yes linux mostly only because of the difference between what runs on on pro versus what runs on server so obviously the the server

doesn't have access to a user interface so i can't put up dialogues or do anything like that or can't launch external windows things like that but it still can run all the other bits and pieces um there's no real in base elements at least there's no real mac versus wind specific functions um and separate also on this there is actually an ios build as well so if you're using the ios sdk you can include the base elements plug-in there as well so all right so i have a question so if you go to base elements. com is this the this is the diagnostic tool or the plug-in which one am i looking at here or is it both that bicylmas. com is the diagnostic tool okay so how do we get to what's the link for the plug-in then we go to goya or what do we do yeah gotta go i'll i'll uh i'll find the link and i'll send it to you to you or we can

find it someone was asking me the question or yeah yeah yeah put it on your screen there if you can do that that'd be easy so there's not a huge big uh in a general site but there is base elementsplugin. com so then i guess the question is what does the plugin do so i'm going to bring up the edit expression dialog here so this is just in data viewer and we're going to show these by type because here is where base element appears so it appears as functions in your calculation dialog and this is then the list of everything that base elements do as you can see it's a fairly big list it's grown over time there's a whole heap of different things in there the idea originally as i said was that it was just a couple of things that i needed and after that we found really cool stuff that we wanted to do and then a lot of this cool stuff that

we've wanted to do has then pushed back into the product itself for example we have in here a json array size function so that counts the size of an array now we used to have set json and we used to have a json path a bit like the json get element but they've they're still in there they're hidden now because they're not needed anymore they've been deprecated because filemaker built their own and i was actually at a session at devcon where clay the one of the programmers for filemaker said oh you know we're doing all these json functions we've based our examples off the base elements plug-in so they actually look at what what other you know tools including this plugin are doing and then go yeah let's do all that all of this here the http stuff is very similar to what's hap what is available in the insert url script step but they do very similar things obviously designed slightly differently um

but um these are these ones do still some things that um the set from url doesn't do so we keep them alive there the other ones that uh comet have recently been put into filemaker the product the whole heap of file function so we've got the ability to open files and read files and again there's stuff here that the product itself doesn't do so being able to do uh list folders but with include various options like for the whether or not you're including subdirectories and using the retaining the full path or just the file names and whether you include hidden files things like that so there's a lot of things essentially that are um cool functions that filemaker has slowly accrued over time but not all of them so yeah so let me so let me just yeah let me jump in here so this is it's kind of an endorsement so would you build a product like you know this and it's kind of free

and then claris goes oh yeah that crap that that nick guy put together right it's like really cool we should like steal that and stick it in our products so literally what happens i can tell you this you don't have to ask nick the engineers at clarus call nick and they start talking right because because so there's all this url protocol stuff with the curl options right and i remember an on ongoing in-depth conversation with the certain engineers who were named nameless who kept calling nick going how did you do it this way and how did you do so and why did we do it this way as they basically stole like a huge chunk of stuff in here and put it in filemaker what 16 and then got better in 17 is that what it was or was it starting 17 when did that come out it came no it came earlier than 16 but they made it actually used they changed slightly one of the

parameters to make it usable because it used to it said from your url used to corrupt your data oh okay it would corrupt your data okay well that's always a good feature i wouldn't call that a feature i'd call that a a bug but you're you're saying you know you you were such a nice guy you were eternally a nice person yeah yeah it's um it used to replace ampersands in the in the url string if it if it found them so it would think that you're sending um data and then it would encode them and you're like no i've already encoded them there they don't need to be re-encoded so i they fixed that in in 16 and made it an optional check box and then uh i think it was 17 that they added or 17 and then they added a whole bit more so it became actually really really useful now yeah yeah no it's it's been a big help and i asked i asked

nick so this is not like the first not our first rodeo together i asked nick you know doesn't it bother you when they steal your features and you know it's like uh you know imitation is the best form of flattery right and because he's always doing new features right so yeah what do you think i i i i would love them for that for all these things to exist so in in the product it's just like steal it steal the whole lot please i'm sorry i'm yelling at the screen but yeah steal the whole lot please yeah load the whole thing in there because if you could put these features all in the product and or you know and then you know maybe you know give pro way for free so we get it in all the developers hands the number of people that would be using filemaker within a year would be up 30 percent it would be it would be they would claris would actually

grow the platform right so yeah so as an example this function filter values right so you've got a and b and you want to filter values and find just the b's you get b back but the other one that people want to do a lot of is the reverse of that so what you want to do is to filter out so essentially take my list and remove a whole bunch of values and just give me what's left so i find that super useful well yeah there is no native yeah because when you filter i mean a lot of times when i filter i'm thinking a filter out not like filter in right but i guess yeah the first time i had to learn that because that cause that by the way what you see right here is on the certification test it's actually a little harder than this but it's they try to trick you by that what they'll do is they'll actually describe an answer that's actually

what this what this thing does then they'll say oh filter this and filter this and what do you get right and then of course filter is also case sensitive they like to throw that in there too so yeah it's uh you know everything there's so many it's like you know there's so many functions in here it's hard not to find something you don't love right so yeah yeah um and we've got now a sort um sort values um we had a i've been using the be one for years and years and years someone did a um speed test on on sort values with different data sets and found that the be one in an external uh plug-in function is actually faster than the native one i've got no idea why i don't know how they can manage to make that their own code native code slower but they have managed to do that so that's been there i mean obviously we don't need ours anymore but it's still

in there um how much how much how much difference in speed is it like 10 or we're talking a lot more than that it was significant yeah it was a you know a factor different yeah yeah yeah yeah that's why you don't want to get rid of it if it's a better implementation so yeah all right well uh wow so what's uh so i mean what are your favorite ones i'm looking here and i see vector dot product right is that like uh linear algebra kind of stuff or what do we i mean i just you know yeah yeah um the dot product of two list vectors are numbers so i don't understand that someone asked me about that could we add a function to do that and i went yeah sure if you've got some c code and you wrote some c code and we added it in i don't i do not understand what these are well i'm a mechanical engineer and i had a again i

got my kicked at uc davis from all that stuff right so i recognize it vaguely but that was 30 years ago i don't remember i don't remember what it was i just remember it being difficult yeah yeah so all right how's the discord people going here okay david there are some questions here hang on so the bass almost plug-in is totally free yes david angel is totally free um but you can there is a option to kick them a couple bucks and that gets you some enhanced goodies in it so there is kind of like a paid i mean he really doesn't push it notice we've been here for 30 minutes really well 35 minutes or so but he's been talking for 20. he hasn't asked for money yet right and so what happens is is that there is this option to give them how much is it per year to be on your support your happy support bonus program for this 199. we do it

as a developer i think so yeah yeah and that gets you all sorts of extra goodies i'm sure he'll cover that david also says uh how is be made c plus plus uh question mark um i mean yes okay yes and that's just because that's the api that we have um to to be able to do this sort of thing it's an old c api that filemaker gives us so okay and then another question is as your filters value out is it uh like substitute well it's like the filter function i it's the opposite of the filter right so it's filter in the filter function filemaker is filter in and this one is filter out it's not a substitute function right so david you got to make sure you mask that before you take the certification test it will bite you in the ass so um questions elsewhere michael gravel's there candido's there they're not saying too much um yeah it's really quiet all

right you can keep going so what are your favorite uh functions uh nick yeah so i'll break them sort of into groups um and and do a couple that that i really like obviously the incent from url we don't use our plug-in much anymore um we also had in here that's sort of started to go away the ability to do smtp but we can do that in in filemaker now the only difference that this one has is that you can do html still so as an example i sent uh we sent out an email this is a copy of it that we get you know this goes out to users of a particular description browser it's got a nice little you know html button on it and and do that so that comes from filemaker it is sent out but you've actually got to generate the text which is this bit here and then you've got to generate an html version so html is quite tricky

you've got to generate all of this code and get that in there and doing html and emails is always harder than doing html on a website because email clients are infinitely more picky they don't do stuff the same way and so that's whenever you see problems with my emails it's because we're always wrestling with the variations between the email clients right so yeah yeah okay cool all right well so you have different groups here you have so you have email there what else you got but uh that's kind of handy um the value stuff i use this all the time so there's different values ones in here as well so just a couple of these different ones values contains duplicates so just to check do a quick check whether there are duplicates within a value list to sort to duplicate a to repeat essentially um a list of values um to trim so you can remove white space from the start and the end of

every value in a value list yeah because trim will do just the end caps right but it doesn't do the yeah yeah trim treats it as a one big text block yeah um but a lot of the times what you want to do is do it on each of the values in a list um removes duplicates so just to get unique and the thing about these these value ones in particular you can do these sorts of things in uh in filemaker either via things like recursive custom functions or perhaps in the while function but the reason to do them in in the plug-in or as native functions if they ever build them is that doing this stuff there's like uh functions in c to do a lot of this so we don't there's not much code actually to do it but because it's native in c you can do heaps of stuff like this and it's really fast and it works off massive data sets so you

know a recursive custom function that you write in filemaker that does the same thing will work but it will be a heck of a lot slower than anything that the plugin can do so the vaddis ones are huge for me some of the other ones we use a lot and that i really like the ability to get and set the clipboard so you can get text off the clipboard if they've copied a file like an image for example you can get that and you can put that into a container field and then you can set it as well so if you have buttons that generate you know data in your solution and you want to be able to set someone's clipboard with a you know copy button you can do that i find that really really handy we have variables in here so we have the ability to get and set variables which is really interesting because a variable in the plug-in sense exists across across the entire

application so you can have variables that are multi-file variables and they don't appear in the data viewer so these only exist in the in the plugin itself so that's kind of handy we have a data type yeah uh well there's a question here i don't want to disrupt don't forget we're going to go back to data type but scott scott is asking how would you use the duplicate function to locate possible duplicate items like addresses right so that's like a fine command right scott i mean it's like where you put an exclamation point on the find i guess i don't know i mean if you want to address that one he's asking about duplicate functions and if if you had um if you had your addresses as a list so say you had a sound set and you pulled together a list you know people that are addresses like that you could then do values contains duplicates like that oh i lost it copy that so

that would tell you whether or not two people had the same address um it's going to be exact it's going to be an exact match so it typos would um slight typos or slight text differences between them would give you um yeah scott that's scott that's dicey because it's like street versus st versus lane ln or aliane you'd want to run the whole thing through some sort of postal cleanup uh service right you know nick i'm just talking out my ass here but stop me when i say something stupid but you want to clean the whole thing up with an online service free or otherwise once it's standardized then you could hammer it but if you just have stuff that you've typed in by hand yeah yeah yeah so yep sorry yeah so the other the other one was a data type that i think filemakers should add so we don't have the concept of arrays in filemaker um they're a bit like list but also slightly different

so you can get and set arrays from value list and find within an array um and delete arrays they're kind of useful but i i don't use them a lot i had specific examples for them that i wanted to do and then i haven't used them much since one that i really want to play with that i haven't yet built in is this idea of a stack so in base elements for developer tool there's a back and forward button that you can use and essentially what that does is it just adds to a list that's over time filming languages they call stacks so essentially you just add things to the stack so each time you go somewhere you push a value onto the stack so the value turns out to be the last place i was so i was on this layout and on this record anytime i go somewhere i push that value onto the back stack and then each time i want to use

it i just pop a value off that stack and and take that and then do something with it does it i have a question does it preserve your state as well like your sort state or just your record you're on in the layout what does it preserve uh the the stack function doesn't so it's it's just storing the data that you're seeing so it's just up to filemaker to then you have to script and say okay go to this layout and go to that record so in in base elements the developer tool letter there's a non-native version of this with variables and i use it i do it with variable global variables and a counter that says where in the global variable array you are so essentially it doesn't go to related record pulls an id and then pulls a uh a layout that you're on and then does go to related record to end up on that layout but this this just makes that coding of

that really handy oh yeah one of the other ones that comes up quite a lot is this ability to fiddle with containers as well so that converts container fields between compressed and uncompressed this will tell you the data types for a container so i don't know if everyone knows like when you store an image inside a filemaker container field as an insert for insert image type filemaker internally converts it to a couple of different formats so if you store for example a png file filemaker will separately convert that png file to a jpeg file because when you're doing viewing being put on a layout and made smaller than their original yep the smaller file contains a thumbnail that's that's generated on the fly so the thumbnails are generated only from jpegs so when you store any other image formats filemaker also generates a jpeg for you so you can actually get a particular type um you you can actually use that to take

advantage and use like filemaker as a sort of basic image conversion option for you because it will store inside the container field a whole bunch of different types and then you can pull one of those particular types out the other one is this convert container so when you're storing a file of any sort in a container you've got two options you can insert it as a file or you can insert it as an image a file you can actually take an image file type so a jpeg or a png or a pdf and store it as a as a file but it will just appear as an icon so appear as an icon a bit like those container uh the plugin files in the container that i showed before so this one lets you convert between the different formats so you can actually use that to say take this image file that's stored as a file and turn it into a an image so that i can actually see the

content of the image so that one comes in really handy one of the other ones obviously is we and then this has been added as well in in filemaking the ability to um execute scripts by name so before the perform script by name existed that was really handy because you could have programmatic things that you're doing you can do execute x x except you sql where do i put that next sql there's a huge difference between this and the execute sql one that filemaker itself has if you have a look the be one has an option for database name so you can actually do sql on other databases the other thing that the plug-in and this is any plugin that does sql the only advantage the plugin knows this one does select only but this shouldn't be sql query this could be this should be called select query right because that's all that it starts whereas this sql statement can be select insert oh

i didn't know that you could do the whole delete update and delete right delete yeah and drop so anything that you can do in sql via idbc with filemaker you can do natively within the within filemaker via the plugin so really handy for being able to drop things like uh log data into a table so for example you you you're somewhere deep into a particular spot and you want to generate a log to say you know this action happens you can just do an insert you don't have to go anywhere you have to go to any layouts you don't have to switch you don't have to create new records you have to do any of those things you just do an insert and you know log the fact that this happened wow so that's really handy yeah big time i actually use that as well in and i'll see if i can bring the code up i use it in in base elements itself one of the things

i showed yesterday was the fact that we have a preferences file in the prefs folder that stores things like your most recently used file and a few other things so obviously once i've dropped that into that file into the preferences folder once if you've got subsequent versions of base elements that file can't be changed i can't just overwrite it with new data so it has to stay the same no matter which version of pace elements you're running but i also found that i add features to that file over time so there's other things that i want to record so you know i started just with a couple of basic preferences and then i add a new option in base elements and then i go oh hang on i'm going to need another another field in here for some particular thing so i actually use that sql plug-in script step and i'll see if i can locate it uh yeah for those of you wondering that's

a local file that he uh forced quit and it was doing a consistency check right so machine died yesterday yep so i actually do this and i'll open this up so that code adds a field to my table adds a field to your table so i've run this yep all right so that adds the field description all right well just just just for the record i've been around doing this a long time i was unaware that you could do that that's impressive that's impressive yeah that's impressive so you're altering your data structures on the fly as you go along which which for most of the people here would be really bad but there are a handful of you here who understand this is literally it's a little like the radioactive sign right you got the little radioactive sign it's like the nuclear weapon here right so you want to be very careful with how you right use this thing right because it might you know blow

up your stuff so yeah um yeah having your scripts define fields then you have a script malfunction it defines an extra 5 000 fields or something because it gets stuck in a loop and then one bretterman says what about a dialog functions for listing files and folders and picking files from the dialogue yeah so a file select dialog so let's run this one that in folder path i'll take out and i'll just turn this off because i don't want it coming up a thousand times and you can have whatever want text you want select the file and then we hit evaluate and that will ask you pick a file okay so i can pick a file here and i'll pick this folder because this is the folder that you get um uh oh that's part of your before you become a sponsor yeah you're being a sponsor of the product you pay that money per year and you get the all the versions

yep samples by the way little drop-off share yeah you get a dropbox share and this is the versions and samples and tools and all sorts of extra widgets so if you want to shed a couple bucks you can get some extra goodies so go ahead oh look at those samples just some various integration things we've done um older versions some tools better convert between different parts and um a few other little bits and pieces there so that's what you get i hit cancel i didn't select a file so i didn't know show you what the path was but there we go we'll pick that one from the key tester and it returns the path to that file okay you can um there's no you can do the same thing with folders the folder select dialog so that will put up the standard folder part so again i pick that and i just get the folder instead you can you can read files you can

open files move files copy files delete files check whether they exist b file import which is the same as inserting a file in a container field except the built-in function script step on in filemaker to insert files and the container field doesn't work on server so the file import also works on server so that you can put things in uh you can pull things out of the the documents folder on filemaker server using a script file you know perform script on server but that's really handy uh ken says the time zone offset looks very cool or maybe that's the pilot me for you see yeah that would be that's always been a pain in the ass for me um is that the is that utc or what is that yeah yeah so this is the time the difference in time between where you are in um times and offset so i'm is that minutes uh it's minutes yeah so if you divide by then you get

your hours yeah although you know it's funny there are places that like in some places in india where it's not just an hour off it's it's like an hour it's 30 hour and 30 minutes off so it's like just i don't i i don't understand how that works there so it's negative number it could be negative or positive number right because which side the date line yeah yeah yeah yep um pdf ones as well so the ability to append pdfs now we can write we can generate a pdf from filemaker from a layout and have that be appended to a particular existing pdf but we can't take two pdfs and just stick them together so this let's do that and the ability as well to pull individual pages out of a pdf so if you've got an existing pdf that someone sends you and you say look i want to generate a different pdf that is only page two and three then you can do that as

well that's really handy uh file import from this is from david import a import import from file import a file does it doesn't it work with script from server i mean so the way server works natively is that you're limited to certain directories right you just can't run wild so do you have a import that does more than that what do you have no you still that that's permissions and that's outside of um you know anyone's controlling the sandboxing yeah yeah if i um i'll just create a new script here and put it up in a window okay so this if you want to do that close that off if you want to do insert file um whatever that happens to be insert file it doesn't work on server yeah so it's just plain does not work okay if you're running a script and you want to bring a file out of the the documents folder on filemaker server via perform script on server you can't do that

but i don't know why you can't seems like an odd thing to exclude but you can't so you're saying what you're talking about if you're taking it into a container right is that what you're saying insert a file into a container yeah okay um so the way around that instead let me just uh i'll bring that back up again so insert file doesn't work on server but what you do instead is set field uh let's just pick you know it doesn't matter any of these just get data i don't actually know what these fields are and you do the file import and path so that does the same thing as insert file um wow there we get this now wow we just ran into this with some other stuff we were wrestling with webdirect on it so because webdirect is pretty limited especially in mobile devices so yeah that's interesting um so ken is asking the question some of the functions that we have

some of the functions have the word quote external in the description what does this mean uh externally in the description where was that i guess when you're down there it's uh uh just just that these are different types here so all functions by name or functions by type so plugin functions appear by themselves and they're given this you know external external means it's yeah outside of filemaker they're all external right so they're not an internal yeah because because most of these up here are built into filemaker right ken so this tells you that it's if you had 360 works it'd be a 360 over here whatever and then it would they would be external too right so but uh like i said once again i would i would vote to take your product and build it into the filemaker pro and then they could make it internal or just ship the plug-in with it that'd be one way of doing it so man that would be

great yeah yep a couple more that i really like being able to set preferences you know so this gets set in a per user you know standard you know mac os preference option thing as well so you can have things that are stored locally that persist between you know different copies of filemaker and different versions and things like that that you can then load up on on the start so again in base elements the developer tool when you purchase it the the details that you use are stored in in preferences and that way if you grab another copy of base elements it opens up and it just goes oh yep no i'll load the preferences cool i've already got an edge key off i go i find that really handy if you work at at all any these days with web services you'll be doing stuff in json but you also probably do a whole bunch of things in xml and be able to direct to that if you

work it with xml at all these are super super handy so being able to direct path essentially if you talk to a web surface and a web service it gives you back xml you can then pick out individual little bits of the xml with this this is essentially this name as the json getelement function but for xml yeah so scott said scott was asking about using the preference uh for the fm training video yeah we're already doing that scott we we write preference files using the file control creator of features of filemaker that were part of 18. so we write two preference files that go into the user's documents directory um and so we write the uh yeah i mean you could he's he's making it simpler but we wrote our own using that right with the native capability um i just it's there's only you know when you make a video play this people always wanted to do more right someone would probably ask me

to have install an ssl certificate for them on their server i'm waiting for that but yeah no it's uh being able to write text files and then bury them in the documents directory and things like that very very useful i mean there's so much in here i mean i don't know how you keep all this stuff straight in your head right this is i i mean the stuff i've asked for because i that i wanted it but i haven't been this this stack stuff is an example stuff i've asked for because i alright i've got a really cool thing i want to do there and then i haven't got around to doing it so there's stuff in there that i've not used myself ah um the last couple of ones are just there's a zip and an unzip and a g-zip and the only reason for the gzip is that's the internal when you compress a container field it's actually stored as a gzip file rather than a

regular zip file is that is that a 7-zip or is that different than 7-zip uh it's the it's well i don't know i don't know it's a it's a standard okay well there they seem to be like new zip algorithms that come out and they compress better and better but then you know the older backwards compatible ones are like less efficient right so i guess g zip is more efficient right so yeah so i think that's kind of i mean we've covered pretty much all of the bits um there's a couple in here that were just concept ideas that i didn't really know what to do with the thing that i've shown you here and this example here is is how you know this is how filemaker works essentially uh the baseline plugin works essentially these are all um functions so there's no script steps at all so i find that useful because you can do things like a case where you have you know a

and then function here and b and then function here and then plug-in functions for example might do things like um dialogue for example so even though you've got a single you've got a single set field or set variable steps that you're doing here potentially essentially what you've done is like a that's the equivalent doing that's equivalent of an if a then display dialogue else if the message so there's ways and only one of those will will display depending on which one gets picked um so there's ways of um there's ways of using functions that you can't use script steps for however i don't even know which version it was but one of the versions of the plugin api let us also create script steps so lots of the other plugins that are around have the option to do various things in script steps so instead of that up again instead of having a for example get text clipboard get text

or set text this could be a better example a clipboard set text function that you've then got to invoke via set variable clipboard set text you can have a set text script step but i i sort of i've ummed an art about whether or not it's worth us putting the coding effort to code lots of these things up as script steps essentially what it is the way that filemaker has done this is it's a wrapper around your existing functions and you get the option to add a bit of user interface so for some things it's really handy but others it's not so all i did instead was the ability to generate your own script steps so you could have you could have script steps that you generate on the fly that you then run i don't know i've not yet come across a really good use for for that that you'd want to be generating new script steps on the fly yeah well but uh you

know i think that's the future of the platform especially with all this xml which is really great so yeah okay so let's just wrap questions here camparis says quiz the extensive list is there a script step where i tell it what i want to do and it tells me what script steps to use yeah i mean i guess can you certain let me back up you know your little uh help description down there you got your functional list and this is there a way to cert can you does that work can you search does that sir can you search on that is that searchable um um no i think this links to the old if you could search on that that's i think what cam baron would love to do i think that would be really useful so you could put keywords in there right like it's all yeah it's all documented on that documents page so this has a list of all these functions and documents them all as

well so you've been searching here carlos says is there any progress on the feature enabling printer selecting and switching will you do that with other plugins do you do printer selecting and switching with this thing or no no not at the moment it's on my to-do list um and i uh i i don't have an answer for that no yeah carlo you know i would well i would just simply ask the question if you want to encourage uh mr nick here to build something i always like people who are like who don't spend any i i some of the biggest complainers i have about my training are ones who actually don't buy my training it's really kind of funny and so i have kind of like this like thing where you know if i'm going to complain i want to make sure i at least threw the guy a little bit of money and so my recommendation is if you want to complain about uh

something that's not in the plug-in you need to be over on his website can you show us where we can go buy the the super bonus enhanced plug-in support you'd be a sponsor there it is right there yep yep yep yep yep so i would simply ask see this this is the one i normally get i gotta i'm gonna have to go fill this out later today and fill that out so um but uh yeah that's uh that a lot it makes me feel better cleaning so go ahead yeah yeah yeah the idea of that is lots of these things you know you the idea of the functions are that they're generic so you can you know that there's then we expose enough of what you need to do but then give you options to do all the different things you want to do so you know xpath and the there's you know abilities to do various curl options a bit like in in certain euro but there's

a thousand of these girl options and they all do different things and then your web service is different and all that you know you've got to try and figure out how it all works that's the idea of the sponsorship is that you go hey i'm trying to do this thing um i don't know how to do it i can't make it work i need i know i need your plugin to make it you know do what it is it might be xml or express or some sort of weird curl thing that's what the sponsorship's for and for for lots of people what we do is we just go okay look you know i can't make this work give me a sample file and so someone will put together a sample file i'll send it to me i'll make it work and then i'll send it back to them so they've got work and code that they can then go on and and have a play with so that's what the

sponsorship's for as well as for us to continue to develop it so we do appreciate all the people that do sponsor just because um you know i i've got a programmer that i pay to write all this stuff i don't write it myself but i pay a programmer to do it i've spent way more in payments to that program and then i have retrieved on sponsorships and i'm fine with that because you know i'm you know we this this is it's out there it gets gloyer out there there's thousands of people that use this every day and they love it um and you know this is one of those little give back to the community things that i'm able to do and then you do get the dropbox full of goodies and a lot of times the things that you need to have done are already in there right like the dropbox of goodies can you just show us that real quick the dropbox of goodies like like

what might they get which would be so amazing is it is the common thing that comes up all the time is this um ability to convert between file paths this is only added into um i think in filemaker now we've got a do we have a is it a function that yeah so this only got added in 19. so we used to use our own function i haven't played with to see whether that does exactly the same thing as what powers does samples again this was the file that i showed before that ability to install um install plugins so just to sample that comes in really handy for lots of people like how do i how do i do this you know how do i get my latest version up on the file this one came up recently someone said to me that they're um the web publishing engine keeps crashing and i need to be able to restart it so this little file all

it does is queries the re web publishing engine and then manually forces a reboot of it really stop stop stop stop you just blew my mind this can this can force a web publishing engine reboot if you have it on the server yeah so you put this file on your server queries that we're publishing in until you test wpa you run that um okay is jacob taylor here he's my my my head of i. t server god services i don't know what we call him he always he likes his title of like like maine dude main cheese of i. t but the reality is he's really kind of the senior server architect strategist guy he's always telling me yeah i had to restart the web publishing engine at dad and i had to use a command line and then it worked and i'm like okay that sucked and so if we could have a plug-in where we just hit a button that would do it that would

be awesome yeah yeah yeah so someone had a had an issue that the web publishing engine kept dying and they asked me about it and i said yeah i've actually wrote a file that does that so this is just a filemaker file you put it up on that filemaker server and then you set up a schedule to run it every you know minute or 30 seconds or however however often you want to check oh a check oh god yeah check it oh so it's a so it's a sat you're running it with sassy sassy okay got it sassy yep um and so it's just doing insert from urls um and there's a couple of different things here there's a generic one to test the xml api which is a good way to see whether customer publishing is running at all this is rest fm which is just another web service thing that we wrote so it's doing that as well and then it's just interpreting various different

options and what it gets back saying you know did it work does this work does whatever if it finds an error it continue an email and then it will also run the be execute command so that's the ability to run shell command so you can do that on time maker pros that you could run a mac os terminal command or on windows you can run a command there as well um that's actually then happens on the server so as you can see it's doing command but actually running fms admin restart web publishing engine all right my head was blown already but now my head's blown double double blown so there we go double the blow all right do you uh do andre wants to know if he takes feature requests normally you have to send him the the sponsor money and then he takes feature requests right andre although andre does kick back a lot to the community so um i mean yeah if you want to

throw him a feature request i would do it i just like anyone else if you want him to take it seriously you might want to be that sponsor person right so um um go here and hit the contact us button yep contact the page there you go cool all right uh and then david goes uh per the last conversation can the execute command is like a send comm send event command right i mean but it's more yeah that's what he said yeah it's a bit like an event man but yeah you're essentially running an os little command so you can do whatever the os that the the the user that's launched filemaker can do so on the on you know a desktop mac or windows that's the logged in user on filemaker server that's actually the fm server user yeah so you can't as fm server um do a there's a whole bunch of things you just basically can't do because yeah is it in that

apple script is he talking applescript with that i think or is that something else i'm thinking of because it seems yeah yeah yeah i mean you could you can there's ways from command line to run apple scripts so you can do um yeah i mean applescript's kind of you know kind of really deprecated technology but it's there um so yeah so you want to use yeah there you go so you can do that sort of thing so that would run a apple script on spoken man like yeah if you really had a and i was excited about that i think we greatly appreciate it i'm gonna cut you loose if you folks have any questions if they have a general question like to support is there like some well you have the one contact there do you have a support email like support goya or how does that work uh there is there is a one that's the app basically i want to plug in um but i

can't tell you my head i've got too many domains um but nick nick goyer dot com dot u as well will get to me okay cool all right everyone we'll catch you tomorrow we gr oh uh how long is this engaged 2020 rcc uh coupon code good for how long will that last uh nick uh good question i hadn't said it but um i usually do it for 30 days after the end of engage so you know engages next week so probably until the at least the end of august end of august and then your turns to a pumpkin cinderella turns to a pumpkin at midnight so there you go all right everyone we'll catch you tomorrow appreciate it and then go buy his stuff it's awesome right thank you richard bye and the guys just stepped up the whole way calm cool collected the quarterback great read good patience more importantly great job up front protecting this quarterback to give you a chance and that's all you can ask for trying to rally down 10 9 25 to go here in the fourth short motion by amendola from the left brady takes the shotgun step stands and throws it left ramadan reaches up and snacks a high throw and lands inside the tent with an eye slightly behind him again he makes the ground

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