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Serial Port functions for MBS Filemaker Plugin

You may have seen that we added SerialPort functions in last prerelease to our plugin.
Currently you can just list ports, open a connection to one or more and read/write data. On reading and writing we have functions to read and write text, single byte value or data as hex encoded text. For normal text you use the write function to send it in a given encoding. Like this: MBS("SerialPort.Write"; $port; "Hello World"; "UTF-8"). Or if you need to send just one character like escape key, you can use MBS( "SerialPort.WriteByte"; $port; 27 ). Or you use MBS( "SerialPort.WriteHex"; $port; $text ) so you can send some control characters noted as hex string like this: "1B7413D5".

We also have a few function to read like SerialPort.Read, SerialPort.ReadByte and SerialPort.ReadHex. Finally you can close the port with SerialPort.Close. As you need to pass a port reference number each time, you can open several ports at the same time.

This functions have been added for a project with a client where we needed to send text to a serial device, a point of sale display. That works fine. We have currently no functions to configure the port as we simply use default settings. In our case it doesn't really matter as the default settings work fine for us on Mac and Windows.

If you have other usages for this functions and you need more control, please email us so we can add more functions. Claris FileMaker Plugin
01 12 12 - 11:36