An application preference has been added to FileMaker Pro to control whether solutions can install files or not. When it is turned off, the "Install Plug-In File" script step does nothing and returns "Command Unavailable" even if run from a script that runs with full access.
The following tables detail where plug-ins should be installed. Note that the locations where plug-ins are installed has changed in recent versions of FileMaker Pro. The order in which the installation of plug-ins is checked is as follows:. If an installed plug-in does not work as expected, verify that multiple versions of the same plug-in have not been installed in multiple places on your system.
In most cases, it is only necessary to have a single version of a plug-in installed for a given version of FileMaker Pro or FileMaker Pro Advanced. Skip to Main Content. Installing and updating plug-ins in FileMaker Pro. The Auto Update feature is great for:. The Auto Update feature has worked in much the same way from Server 5. However there is one small change in FileMaker Pro 9 that has caused some extra plugin maintenance work.
FileMaker Pro 9 now has the ability to store plugins in 2 locations. The application data directory has different locations for all supported operating systems for FileMaker Pro Now that you can install plugins in more than one location you will need to learn the new rules about managing plugins in these different locations. For example what happens if you have the same plugin installed in both locations? Tar, which stands for tape archiver , was originally developed to create tape backups on UNIX systems.
Its now commonly used for bundling files for all sorts of purposes. From the command-line prompt in the Terminal application, navigate to the directory where the plug-in is located on your machine by using the cd command.
You can learn more about changing directories by typing in man cd at the command prompt. Say that the plug-in you are working with is called foo. You want to turn this into an archive called foo. To do this, you would type the following at the command line:. Take the. The archive is automatically unbundled when Mac clients download the archive. If you are using a Mac OS X version of FileMaker Server, you need to make sure that any plug-ins you place on the server are owned by the fmsadmin group and have group read permissions.
A sample plug-in is installed with FileMaker Server so that you can see the directory and naming structures that you need to follow. Theres also a sample FileMaker Pro database that contains scripts to download the sample plug-in.
These are both valuable resources the first time you go about setting up an auto-upload routine. To give you an additional, more real-world example, we walk through the steps youd take to build an auto update routine for a different plug-in.
Theres nothing special about this choice; we merely wanted to use something other than the sample plug-ins that ship with FileMaker. You follow the same steps for any plug-in that you use. When you download UPLOADit, youll get a folder full of demo files, instructions, and of course, the plug-ins themselves.
The tasks you would need to undertake to prepare FileMaker Server to download these to client machines are as follows:. You need to have both because the plug-ins have different names on the two platforms.
Copy the. The actual download process is covered in the following sections. This plug-in is part of the typical installation of FileMaker Pro, so unless youve disabled the plug-in for some reason, chances are that the client application will be all prepared to download plug-ins.
As with all plug-ins, the AutoUpdate plug-in should be placed in the Extensions folder within the FileMaker Pro application directory. To confirm that the plug-in is enabled, go to the Plug-ins tab of the Preferences dialog, which is shown in Figure Figure The AutoUpdate plug-in must be enabled on a workstation for it to be able to retrieve downloads of other plug-ins from FileMaker Server.
As part of the routine for performing the actual downloadwhich is described in detail in the next sectionyoull write a script that checks that the AutoUpdate plug-in is installed and active. If its not, you can show users a dialog telling them to call the database administrator or giving them instructions on how to obtain and enable the AutoUpdate plug-in. The actual downloading of a plug-in from the server to the client machine is triggered by a script executed on the client machine.
The AutoUpdate plug-in, which was discussed in the preceding section, has three functions, which all play a role in an auto-update routine. These three functions are. Table The ExtensionsSaved folder to contain the backup of the outdated plug-in or support file couldn be created.
The file to be replaced on the client computer couldn be deleted from the Extensions folder. The function call from the client computer to the computer running FileMaker Server failed. The server computer might be running a previous version of FileMaker Server.
To download a plug-in from the server, a user must first open a client session to a file that resides on the server. Plug-in downloads will not work from a peer-to-peer hosted file. If a certain plug-in is required for a file to operate as designed, you will want to have the auto update routine be part of the files startup script. That way, if for some reason the user isn able to retrieve the plug-in, you can prevent her from entering the system. Whether you write the routine using just a single script or split it into three or more subscripts that are called from a master script is a matter of personal preference.
In the example that follows, we use a single script because its a bit easier to follow the logic. First, however, we briefly discuss each of the parts of the routine independently. Every plug-in should contain a function that returns the name and version number of the plug-in itself.
0コメント