FileMaker Server Side Scripting Gotchas

It has been  long time since I blogged about technology and even longer since I blogged about FileMaker, but here is a little tidbit that is worth mentioning.

FileMaker 9 and 10 can both run FileMaker Scripts on the server. This is great, but it is really helpful to understand what the differences are between running a script on the Server and running them on the client.

The obvious one is many of the scripts steps that aren't supported. You can't use any of those.  But there are a couple of others that can be real gotchas unless you understand what the Server Side environment actually is.

When FileMaker Server runs a script, it behaves as though it actually the following

1. Opens a copy of FileMaker client, as host.
2. Runs the script
3. Closes the client.

The effect of this is pretty profound. So everything that is happens when File is opened and closed as HOST happens in this case.

• Open and close scripts run. 
• Globals are set permanently.

But this one is also true

• File References must include folders

This last one is just got my friend Mike Lee today.  Mike was having trouble understanding why a Script was failing when run on the server. Luckily I had seen something like this with ODBC accessing FileMaker.  So we were able to figure it out. Here is the story.

When Files are hosting on FileMaker server, the actual folder structure is ignored when it comes to resolving external file references.  For example, take this folder structure:

A file Reference that gets created on the server might look like this 

file:FileB.fp7
file:Folder/FileB.fp7

Suddenly the folder paths matter.  You get exactly the same behavior when accessing FileMaker databases hosted on FileMaker server with ODBC.

Hope this helps!