Month: June 2013

Converting Web Pages to PDFs in FileMaker Go

Post author By Janet Tokerud
Post date June 27, 2013
2 Comments on Converting Web Pages to PDFs in FileMaker Go

FileMaker Go has great PDF functionality. Since the iPad came out, I’ve been liking PDFs more than ever because you can do so much with them. You can annotate them and sign them. It’s great.

Update: Some of my predictions here have come true in FileMaker Go 13.

As I mentioned in my last post, the FileMaker Go app I’m working on has a URLs table. In that previous post I explain how to invoke the Chrome app on your iOS device to open URLs. Here I want to show you how to user PDFConverter to convert a URL to a PDF. All this for the $3.99 price of the PDFConverter app for iPad or $2.99 for the iPhone app if you don’t already have one or the other or both. PDFConverter will also convert lots of other things to PDF format.

What I like best is to be able to convert a web page to a PDF so I can annotate and store that PDF locally. Then I can read at my leisure even if offline.

The PDFConverter App

Here we go. Once PDFConverter is installed on your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch, you can type in “pdf” in front of the http url on the webpage you are on in Safari to invoke PDFConverter.

Creating your PDF Converter Button with Open URL Script Step

To run this with a button in FileMaker Go, you just do like I showed you last week. Use the Substitute command like this in your Open URL script step you assign to a button:

Substitute ( URLs::URL ; “http” ; “pdfhttp” )

Here it is in Button Setup:

Anyone with FileMaker Pro 12 can do this. When you click the button, you get this:

Click the Convert button at the top right to create the PDF. Then open your shiny new PDF in your PDF app of choice. I’m fond of PDF Expert myself.

There is more to come in FileMaker Go. You can’t save to FileMaker Go’s directory from another iOS app — yet! And I’m hoping we’ll get a way to access PDFs on Dropbox. It must be coming because FileMaker PDFs are wonderful and need to be easy to suck directly into FileMaker Go – on the fly.

FileMaker Pro and PDFs

In the meantime, you will probably be doing some of your PDF importing from FileMaker Pro where a two-finger tap in the container field (on Mac) will give you the option to import PDF (if you’ve got your container field set as interactive). You can import a bunch of PDFs quickly this way where they will then be available on iPad and iPhone in FileMaker Go. This works really well when you’ve got your FileMaker file hosted somewhere like I do at my home (office).

Otherwise those not indulging in FileMaker Pro (an indulgence I highly recommend), you’ll need to move your new PDFs into FileMaker’s iPad or iPhone directory via iTunes. Once in the filemaker directory on your iPad or iPhone, you can import those PDFs at will from FileMaker Go.

Wikipedia Entries as PDFs

I see that the Wikipedia web site will create PDFs for you for any particular entry. They also have a book option in which you can add multiple PDFs. It takes a few seconds for the PDF to first be generated. At that point, you can download that PDF. If you are on a PC or Mac, you could then move that PDF into your FileMaker database.

FileMaker Fever

FileMaker Fever Blog is now on filemakerfever.com

Post author By Janet Tokerud
Post date June 16, 2013

I just migrated my posts from my TypePad FileMaker Fever blog to here. I have been lax in posting recently, so thought before starting up again in earnest, I would migrate to WordPress. So here we go! Check out my About page written today to get a feel for my approach to FileMaker and FileMaker blogging.

FileMaker 12 FileMaker GO FileMaker Tips iOS Apps

Opening URLs in the Chrome App from FileMaker Go on iOS

Post author By Janet Tokerud
Post date June 16, 2013
2 Comments on Opening URLs in the Chrome App from FileMaker Go on iOS

Opening URLs with Chrome App on an iPhone screenshot

I’ve been working on a knowledge app in FileMaker Pro and Go lately. I keep track of interesting and favorite people, places and things there. My favorite part is collecting interesting people. People like Thomas Jefferson, Jony Ive, or someone in the news. Whoever I am interested in. I read about Edward Snowden today and thought he would be a good person to learn more about so I added him to my app.

I also track URLs that relate to those people, places and things as I find particularly good ones. Today I had trouble opening a couple URLs I found using the Open URL command in FileMaker Go. I thought it might be because the URLs were a little unusual. One URL had an asp extension. When I had another URL not work, I started thinking.

I suspected that Safari or Chrome would open them. It’s actually hard to find the iOS URL scheme to make Safari open a URL in FileMaker. I bet I can find one, but meantime, I knew Chrome has documentation on their URL scheme since they want apps to use Chrome on iOS. So, I Googled to find the information and it was a little spotty but I was able to piece it together after a few tries.

The Open URL in Chrome Tip. Normally, when you want FileMaker’s internal browser to Open URL, you might put in a URL like this one: https://filemakerfever.com. To get FileMaker to invoke Chrome app to open the URL directly instead, use the Substitute command:

Open URL [ Substitute(URLs::URL,”http”,”googlechrome”) ]

Here are a few extra details to make sure it works for you:

Make sure that Chrome is installed on your iOS device
This won’t work on Mac/PC with Filemaker Pro – but there may be a different way for that. Install this button or put this in a script meant for FileMaker Go use.
In this example i have a URLs table and a field called URL which is holding a normal URL

That’s about it. If I were to release this feature in an app for sale, I would either need to:

Specify that the user has to have Chrome installed in the documentation or
Do a test to see if Chrome is installed or,
Create a preference that says, “I want to use Chrome to open URLs” instead of FileMaker’s browser.

All right. This is the kind of tip I love best. Short, sweet and something I can use in lots of places. That’s why it was worth spending some time a Peet’s on Father’s Day to figure it out. Probably my favorite two areas of development these days are interapplication communication and taking advantage of the plethora of good stuff on the web in some way. This tip does both!