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MBS FileMaker Plugin 6.5 for OS X/Windows

Nickenich, Germany - (December 12th, 2016) -- MonkeyBread Software today is pleased to announce MBS FileMaker Plugin 6.5 for Mac OS X, Linux and Windows, the latest update to their product that is easily the most powerful plugin currently available for FileMaker Pro. As the leading database management solution for Windows, Mac, and the web, the FileMaker Pro Integrated Development Environment supports a plugin architecture that can easily extend the feature set of the application. MBS FileMaker Plugin 6.5 has been updated and now includes over 4300 different functions, and the versatile plugin has gained more new functions:

For this release we now include a Linux version. This plugin file can be used with FileMaker Cloud, or on any FileMaker Server running under 64-bit Linux. Over 2200 functions are instantly available for Linux, others may follow later. Please let us know what features you'd like to see for FileMaker Cloud in the future.

We rewrote our Audit function. It's now much faster, eliminates duplicate log entries and only records one log entry for a new record to reduce the amount of log records. You should see a big performance gain when using tables with a lot of fields and a FileMaker Server for hosting.

The menu commands have been reimplemented for Windows. Now we support all the font styling we had on Mac before. You can now use custom fonts, bold/italic/underline/strikeout styles, font sizes, colors and a background color. Instead of simple checkmarks, you can use bullet, diamond or mixed marks.

For macOS 10.12 we added several TouchBar functions. You can define one app wide and per window touch bars. Each can have buttons which trigger scripts or evaluate expressions. This way you can offer contextual commands on the keyboard and react in FileMaker. You can even define buttons to use in FileMaker itself, like a button to show/hide the debugger.

To interface existing Java classes, the plugin can now optionally talk to Java. From older Java 6 to latest Java version 8, you can load whatever Java version you like. Than you can create objects from classes and call both class and object methods. You can set and query properties on those classes or objects and exchange data directly. Containers can be passed/returned to/from Java as byte arrays for efficient data exchange.

For those using flatbed/feeder scanners, we can now interface them on Windows via native drivers. We use the official WIA interface from Microsoft which most scanners nowadays support. You can either use system dialogs to scan or send scan commands directly. On Mac we now provide optionally windows to select scanner or perform scans. In total, we now provide three ways to scan: 1st TWAIN for macOS and Windows, 2nd ImageCapture for macOS and 3rd WIA for Windows. All three ways can get your scans with or without a dialog to an image file.

For the Script Workspace we provide an enhanced contextual menu. We provide copy/cut/paste/delete commands at your finger tips and commands to enable/disable script steps. For perform script steps we now provide a way to jump directly to the target script.

On Windows you can now control the print dialog. Our plugin can automatically select printer, paper format, paper tray and other options. You can query available printers, paper formats and trays. For Mac, please use our existing PrinterDialog functions.

We added more DynaPDF functions: You can now directly draw styled text from a field in your layout to a PDF. The plugin internally converts the styles to DynaPDF formatting commands. You can now process data from XFA forms automatically and when printing PDFs on Windows, you can now optionally show a print dialog.

On Mac you can workaround the printing issues with FileMaker and macOS Sierra. If you don't like the scrolling elasticity in your layouts, you can disable it. The plugin can now list and trigger commands on the FileMaker windows directly. For example in a table view, we can trigger the dialog to customize which fields are shown. Via plugin functions you can control the updater in FileMaker, trigger update search or change various options.

For editing Excel documents, you can copy sheet content from one sheet to another, even across books. You can copy rows from one sheet to another. When writing formulas you can now include the pre-calculated result as number, text or boolean value.

You can now calculate the width of a text with a given font. So you can automatically cut text and add dots via custom functions in your layouts.

For Windows we added still photo capture to our video recorder. For the Webviewer you can now switch it to silent mode and javascript errors are not longer displayed to users.

Our barcode generator learnt two new types: DotCode and HanXin. You can query the memory used by FileMaker, clear recent files in preferences on Mac, list mounted volumes, change orientation for images in EXIF metadata, send text attachments in emails and get/set the current working directory.

We updated CURL library to version 7.51.0, DynaPDF to 4.0.5.15, libSSH2 to 1.8, libXL to 3.7.0, OpenSSL to 1.0.2j, SQLAPI++ to 4.1.10, SQLite to 3.15.0 and zint to 2.5.

More details in the release notes. Please take the time to check our 450 example databases and check where you can use our plugin features in your solutions. Claris FileMaker Plugin
12 12 16 - 13:45