Version 0.84 of bBox for FileMaker Now Available

Optimized for FileMaker 15, the new version of bBox includes 160 examples

We are pleased to release another update to bBox, v0.84 of our free utility plug-in to extend FileMaker solutions to other programs, code libraries, and OS X functions including Python, Ruby, AppleScript, Perl, Bash/sh, XPath, and SQLite.

 

This version has the following changes:

  • added function descriptions (FileMaker 15 only)
  • was returning wrong error code if problem reading output from POSIX commands (Bash, Curl, etc.)
  • new “no wait” option for Bash, Curl, and Sort to run processes asynchronously
  • new bBox_PythonEval for quick & easy calls with larger Python scripts or classes

 

There are over 160 examples in the bBox v0.84 demo file. Some of the recently added examples demonstrate:

  • using XlsxWriter to create Excel files with formatting & calcs
  • using clipboard and XPath functions to list all fields from a table or layout
  • running a PHP script [also see the blog post]
  • LDAP & Open Directory lookups
  • performing basic SMTP email sending
  • parsing JSON weather data from a web API
  • using xhtml2pdf to create PDF files from FileMaker data or HTML

In addition, other developers have built example solutions using bBox, including:

You can get more details on the bBox plug-in and its functions at http://beezwax.net/bbox and the bBox Wiki.

Simon

5 thoughts on “Version 0.84 of bBox for FileMaker Now Available

  1. How does the no wait work? I’ve been doing it manually with a trailing “&”, hopefully your solution is more robust :).

    1. @zerobatsu,

      There are some complications that make just using ‘&’ not work. Some cases may require piping stdout to /dev/nul, in other cases using & and disown may work better, e.g.:

      cat "/tmp/myfile" & disown

      The ‘no wait’ option is still a bit beta-ish, but has been working solidly & consistently for where I’ve used it so far. The mode values that some bBox functions use are bit flags. Enabling this option is easy, just add 4 to your current mode value to get this behavior.

      Simon

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