One might think, “No problem, I’ll just use Export Field Contents and I’ll script it to put the file into one of those directories.” However, Export Field Contents is not a server-compatible script step.Īt first glance we thought, “Damn. The problem is that the external container file is neither in the Documents directory nor the Temp directory.

Have FileMaker Server hand the path over to an Import step so that the importing would then happen server-side.

Ask FileMaker Server to get the path to the file.

Insert an Excel file into that Container.

Let’s say you have a externally-stored Container field in your file and you want to:

Let’s first step back for a moment and look at some of the challenges involved in performing an import on FileMaker Server.īy default, there are 2 places from which a server-side script can import a file: the Documents directory and the Temp directory. Plus as an added bonus Donovan (one of our talented Beezwax developers) has provided a little custom function that enables a spinner graphic to keep the user informed of the progress of your import. It really is like having minions at your beck and call…exciting stuff.

In this post we will see how to have FileMaker Server run imports and free up the FileMaker client to allow users to perform other tasks without waiting for the import to finish. As promised, I’m posting my techniques here, as well as uploading the example database files I have been using to do the import on server examples. This spring I presented these techniques at four FileMaker Dev Meetups on the West Coast. This article is a continuation of the PSoS discussion and includes more cool things you can do with it, specifically running database imports on FileMaker Server.

I hope that since our previous blog post you have been exploring the possibilities created by FileMaker’s Perform Script on Server (PSoS).

Fmp12 to excel