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Monthly Archives

April 2015

Receive data from an external device in FileMaker Pro

With Troi Serial Plug-in you can receive data sent from an external device with a serial (RS232) interface in FileMaker Pro. You can have the plug-in start a script upon receiving in order to process the received data in your database.

Receiving the data

Assume you have an external serial device connected to a (virtual) serial port on your computer. You can use a serial-USB adapter to connect to a USB port on your computer, which will then act as a virtual serial port.

To receive data from this device, first open the (virtual) serial port on your computer using the Serial_Open function. Add this script step to a ScriptMaker script:
Set Variable[ $ErrorCode; Serial_Open( "-Unused"; "COM1"; ) ]
This will open the COM1 port.
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Selecting Files in FileMaker

With Troi File Plug-in you can easily let a user select a file on disk, for example to get the contents into filemaker. With the plug-in you can also move or rename it, to indicate the file has been handled.

Selecting the file

Use the TrFile_SelectFileDialog function to open up a dialog which lets the user select a file. By default all the files can be selected. If you want the user to be able to select only files with a certain extension use the TrFile_SetDefaultType function first.

To let the user select any file add these script steps to a ScriptMaker script:
Set Variable [$DontCare; TrFile_SetDefaultType( "-Unused"; "")] Set Variable [$FilePath; TrFile_SelectFileDialog( "-Unused"  ; "Please select a file.") ]
This will return the path to the file for example:
MacHD:Users:John:Documents:FinancialReport2014.xlsx
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