Virtual List – Page 4 – FileMakerHacks

Update 4 Sep 2012: Preliminary testing indicates that the “line swallowing bug” alluded to below has been fixed in FileMaker 12. Also, in FM 12, the maximum layout length and width have been increased to 444 inches (32,000 pt).

There was a time, many years ago, when the maximum number of characters you could store in a FileMaker text field was 64,000. With the introduction of FileMaker 7 in 2004, that limit was expanded to approximately one billion characters (2 Gb of data divided by 2 bytes per Unicode character), i.e., more than you or I will typically ever need.

But while the capacity of a text field expanded astronomically, the maximum length of a layout remained unchanged at 110 inches (ten 8.5 x 11 inch pages), leading to a dichotomous situation where FileMaker can store vastly more data in a field than it can easily preview, print or output to PDF.

For example, let’s say you’ve decided to build a data warehouse for public domain literary works. Continue reading “Long Documents in FileMaker 11” →

Demo file: 2010-12-13-export to ical

The other day I needed to export some appointments from FileMaker to iCal. I’d never done this before, but I did a bit of reading on Wikipedia and elsewhere, and it turns out to be fairly straight forward. I don’t claim that what follows is in any way authoritative, just that it works… and not just with iCal, but with Outlook, Google Calendar and any other program that recognizes the iCalendar format.

Let’s start with a basic table of appointments, like this.

We’re going to create an “ics” file, which is a text file with three distinct elements. At the beginning of the file is the header, which looks like this:

BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//FileMaker Pro//NONSGML yourSolutionNameHere//EN

Next we have one or more body entries that look like this:

BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Marketing Meeting UID:00188BD54F5D-63427112000-1000028 DTSTAMP:20101206T180000Z DTSTART:20101206T180000Z DTEND:20101206T193000Z END:VEVENT

And at the very end of the file comes the footer, which looks like this:

END:VCALENDAR

Continue reading “Exporting Data to iCal, Outlook, Google Calendar, etc.” →