We are pleased to release another update to bBox, v0.83 of our free utility plug-in to extend FileMaker solutions to other programs, code libraries, or OS X functions (Python, Ruby, AppleScript, Perl, Bash/sh, XPath, SQLite).
If you’ve developed solutions with FileMaker for any length of time, you’ve almost certainly created files using FileMaker’s native Excel exports. Although quite useful, this feature gives almost no control over the formatting, and definitely no way to set formulas, charts, or even text formatting.
Continue reading “Excel formatting and charts from FileMaker using XlsxWriter”
We are pleased to release another update to bBox, v0.82 of our free FileMaker utility plug-in.
Using a combination of AngularJS, HTML5, CSS, WKHTMLTOPDF, PDFtk, bBox and FileMaker scripting, we can create PDF reports from a FileMaker solution, taking advantage of the design and development flexibility afforded by using JavaScript and web tools to accomplish the task.
Continue reading “JavaScript-driven PDF Reports in FileMaker using AngularJS”
Xhtml2pdf is a cross-platform Python module that allows easy conversion of HTML or XML to PDF files. Its dependencies, ReportLab & Pisa, also have a host of very useful functions, including programmatically creating or modifying PDF content & creating barcodes.
For quite a while, the documentation and product information for bBox has mentioned it as a way to run PHP scripts, but I only just recently realized that we never had any examples of how to do this.
Here are two methods to try.
Its been almost a year since we’ve mentioned bBox on this venue, but we are now pleased to announce that version 0.80 is publicly available.
There are a number of ways of working with JSON data in FileMaker. At least two typical ones are:
A new version of our free bBox FileMaker plug-in is now available.
Some of the changes since the last release are:
A new version of our free bBox FileMaker plug-in is now available.
Some of the changes since the last release I blogged about are:
It’s FileMaker Developer Conference time, with 8 Beez in San Antonio for DevCon. We’re studying new development techniques from FileMaker Inc. and our industry peers, sharing a few methods of our own and even riding a few mechanical bulls at a real live cattle ranch!
Continue reading “hello San Antonio. hello FileMaker DevCon.”
I was trying to test out some HTTP post transactions with the curl command, and things weren’t working.
One glitch was due to how the curl command parses its options. All characters, including spaces can be significant, so “-X POST” is not the same as “-XPOST”. This difference might be hidden if calling from the shell, which trims extraneous spaces in parameters, but I was calling via the bBox plug-in’s curl function, and this calls the command directly from FileMaker.
In order to more easily work with XML data, I’ve added the libxml2 library to version 0.54 of the bBox plug-in.
Among other things, libxml2 provides support for XPath 1.0 queries, which can be used to easily extract or set values from XML data, so XPath was my first choice. Although XML has lost a bit of its shine as JSON has come into vogue, XML is still integral to many systems, including FileMaker. Also, the XPath routines can be used for similar syntaxes, so for instance, you might find it helpful for scraping data from a HTML page.
Today we are making bBox, our toolbox of external functions for FileMaker, freely available to all FileMaker developers. Use it to extend the reach of your FileMaker solutions to resources outside of FileMaker by launching and communicating with other programs, utilizing the powerful commands built-in to Mac OS X, and easily creating, processing, and managing files.
