Tag: Mac

Apple WWDC 2022 and beyond

by Olivia Gonzales
Posted in All, Events, Integration, Mobile Development

The 2022 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) highlighted new ways for developers to build with APIs, introducing updates to Swift® and Safari®, revealing improvements in accessibility, and uncovering a mountain of innovative product upgrades and releases. We’re sharing a summary of news and resources we collected from WWDC 2022 sessions, along with an ongoing series of updates to this blog post.

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fmsadmin: where did you go?

by Simon Brown
Posted in All, FileMaker

I have a few scripts, including some Facter reporting “facts”, that make heavy use of FileMaker Server’s fmsadmin command. After a 14.0v4 on install on Yosemite I was puzzled to discover that one of the scripts wasn’t working.

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Summarizing FileMaker Server Access.log data

by Simon Brown
Posted in All, FileMaker, FileMaker Server, Server Administration, Techniques

Various times I’ve needed to do some quick summaries of how a given server and its databases were being used. On macOS and Linux we can use shell commands such as grep to get a quick summary of what’s happening on a server.

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Listing hosted FileMaker files from the shell

by Simon Brown
Posted in All, FileMaker, Server Administration, Techniques

As part of a shell script I’m cooking up, one of the required tasks is to list all currently hosted database files on a Mac OS based FileMaker server. This may get deployed over multiple servers, and I want to keep it as simple and trouble free as possible.

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Summarize how often databases are opened in FileMaker Server

by Simon Brown
Posted in All, FileMaker, Server Administration, Techniques

We needed to quickly know how often various databases were being opened on a client’s server.

If you have Access logging enabled and are using a Mac OS based system, this shell snippet will give you a nice summary of how often each database has been opened:

awk -F" '{ if($3 == " opening database ") print $4;}' '/Library/FileMaker Server/Logs/Access.log' | sort | uniq -c

Unfortunately, it won’t show you a count for databases that were never opened within the scope of the current access log.

Simon.

Debugging Apache with OSXS 10.8 Server 2.2

by Simon Brown
Posted in All, Server Administration

Besides being a bit of a mouthful, debugging Apache configuration issues has gotten slightly more complicated after Apple released the Server 2.2 update for Mac OS X Server.

Formerly, you could do a basic configuration check this way:

apachectl -t

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Code Signing a FileMaker Runtime

by Simon Brown
Posted in All, FileMaker, Techniques

I wanted to code sign a runtime to avoid issues with users who had the higher security level set on their 10.8 based systems. Although lowering these permissions or holding down the control key when the app is launched will all help with this issue, code signing seems a reasonable and desirable, and removed the support issue.

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List cron entries for all users on Mac OS X

by Simon Brown
Posted in All, Server Administration

I needed to investigate why a script was being run, and I was pretty sure cron was launching it. The problem was, little useful information was being logged, and no one was sure how it had been set up or what user it was under. Although launchd is now the preferred mechanism on Mac OS for these kinds of things, you’ll still see many systems where cron is being used.

First, you want to become the root user. The following Terminal command is one way to accomplish this:

sudo -s

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Managing Files with AppleScript

by donovanchan
Posted in All, FileMaker, Techniques

If you’re like most power FileMaker users, you’ve discovered that it’s a great tool for managing collections of things or for gathering disparate data sources for reporting. So you’ve probably wanted at some point to do one or more of these actions:

  • Get a list of files on your computer
  • Import a batch of files
  • Move files on your computer
  • Read the text of a file that doesn’t import correctly (e.g., HTML)

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Unleashing Mac OS X’s Color Picker in FileMaker

by donovanchan
Posted in All, FileMaker, Techniques

Color is one of the most important tools available to you when designing user interfaces. Using a little color can turn a drab wall of text into something attractive and readable.

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Area Disclosure in FileMaker Using Sub-Summary Parts

by Simon Brown
Posted in All, Design, FileMaker, Techniques

The attached file demonstrates a technique for opening/closing areas of a record, allowing a user to hide the information they don’t want to see.

FileMaker File:  DisclosureAreas2.fp7

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Charting from the Active Field

by Will Miro
Posted in All, Design, FileMaker, Techniques

Neither I nor my client can anticipate every chart that the solution’s users might want to see. A user’s desire to view a high-level visual representation of their data can be spontaneous and idiosyncratic. This technique allows for the user to create an ad hoc chart, albeit within narrow parameters (i.e. the chart is simple, presents only counts of values, and is pre-formatted).

FileMaker File: ChartActiveField.fp7

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Setting permissions for FileMaker Server’s Database folder

by Simon Brown
Posted in All, FileMaker, Server Administration, Techniques

The Problem

Most FileMaker Server setups on OSX that I have seen are using the default permissions as set by the FilerMaker Server (FMS) installer. When viewed in the Terminal, they look like this:

drwxrwxr-x  11 fmserver  fmsadmin   374 Jul 16 12:54 Databases

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