Have you ever wanted to export a single field and maintain all the characters in that field? This article explores the possibility with XML Export and the use of a simple XSLT. But first we’ll explain the good, the bad and the ugly of some different standard ways to export TEXT out of FileMaker.
Using this sample text in one field (and one record) we will make different exports and review the results:
Continue reading “An In-Depth Look at “Export Field Contents””
Editor’s note: Today it’s my pleasure to present a guest article written by Beverly Voth. Like many other developers, I have enjoyed and benefitted from her ongoing contributions to the FileMaker community.
I do a lot of text manipulation for EDI (Electronic data interchange – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_data_interchange) and plain text exports with fixed-width field data. Some varieties of EDI use XML, but this article is about plain text. EDI may or may not use the fixed-width format. Fixed-width reports may or may not use delimiters and various “padding” characters.
I created two FileMaker custom functions to help me calculate fixed-width and EDI text for export, and if you wish, you can follow along in today’s demo file, Fixed Width EDI.
27 Mar 2017: see User-Friendly Excel Exports, part 6 for an updated approach.
So far in this series we’ve been looking at exporting data to Excel from a single table (Contacts). Today we’re going to extend the technique to encompass a second related table, Donations, and without too much trouble we can leverage existing work from earlier entries in this series (part 1, part 1.1 and part 2).
To avoid unnecessary repetition, this article assumes familiarity with the aforementioned predecessors, and you can follow along in today’s accompanying demo file, excel exports, part 3, if you are so inclined.
27 Mar 2017: see User-Friendly Excel Exports, part 6 for an updated approach.
[Note: To avoid a huge amount of redundant repetition, this article assumes that you are familiar with part 1 and part 1.1 in this series.]
Today we’re going to take a look at streamlining the approach introduced in part 1 by reducing clutter on the Relationships Graph, going from this…
…to this, with no loss in functionality.
…and you can follow along in today’s demo file, excel exports, part 2, if you are so inclined. Continue reading “User-Friendly Excel Exports, part 2”
Bruce Robertson emailed me off list with an improved version of my demo from part 1, excel exports, part 1.1, which I am sharing with his permission. The improvements are…
a) live preview fields showing the data to be exported.
b) an “Eval Error Tester” script to make sure the output code in the alias table is well-formed.
Thank you Bruce for making this available.
27 Mar 2017: see User-Friendly Excel Exports, part 6 for an updated approach.
Many end users appreciate FileMaker’s ability to export a found set of records in Excel format — it’s fast, straight-forward and empowering. One request that I have received from clients multiple times over the years is: make the exported field names in the top row of the spreadsheet “human-friendly”…
For example, instead of this:
…perhaps they would rather see this:
Another request has been to allow data from multiple source fields to be combined into single export columns, as per columns A and C here:
And a third request has been to provide an interface so that users can pick and choose fields to export, including (where appropriate) related fields, without having to navigate the complexity of the native FileMaker export dialog. Continue reading “User-Friendly Excel Exports, part 1”
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.”
