FileMaker: Plastic 2 & First Data API

I use the Plastic plug-in from 360Works to do credit card processing within FileMaker. It’s a daunting task at first, but once it is setup, it’s absolutely great. This guide explains how to setup a First Data credit card gateway API for use with FileMaker using the Plastic 2 plug-in.

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FileMaker: Getting Live Exchange Rates

Filemaker-iconThis technique uses Applescript and cUrl to get the current exchange rate between two currencies. The results are returned to a field within FileMaker.

For this we’re using a database called PRODUCTS and a temporary global field called Temp 001, so change these accordingly for your database.

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FIleMaker: Fixing The Annoying Error 101

Filemaker-iconWhen creating loops that traverse through all the records of a found set, most all of us use the useful “Go to Record/Request/Page [Next; Exit after last]” function. It’s quite nice, since it prevents a loop from continuing into infinity when you reach the last record of a found set. However, you will always get an Error 101 from this.

Error 101 is telling us that the record we want is not found. For this case, the record we want is the next record, which doesn’t exist because we’re already at the end. You would think the built in function would suppress this error when you select to option to exit after the last record, but the error still gets logged, and will pop-up if we use the debugger window or if we are running a server script.

What can we do?

We we have two choices: ignore the benign error or use another method. I chose the latter, a method that won’t trigger the error.

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FileMaker: More Useful Date Fields

Filemaker’s date field is not very kind to users

especially ones that like to type instead of using their mouse to select a date. If a user wanted to enter in “10” for the date, with the logic that “10” is the day of the date of the current month, they would be prompted with this error:Image

It is a little more wordy than it needs to be, as it should simply say, “Please re-type your entry in MM/DD/YYYY format.” We can avoid this problem all together by adding in a script trigger to our field, but first we need the script to trigger.

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