[FX.php List] [Off?] Accessing files on other machines with PHP

[Troy Meyers]

One of the reasons I switched to FMS 12 was the new way containers are handled. (The other was the improved interaction with iOS.)

I had hoped to be able to have files in container fields (JPG photos) that I'd easily be able to access by a different machine than the one running FMS. I actually had hoped to have the photos ON this other machine, by setting the Base Directory to be on the other machine, using the network path method. Guess what, you can do that with regular FileMaker Pro 12, but FileMaker SERVER will not let you have the files for the containers anywhere but in the Databases folder, a few levels down.

So, to work around this I had hoped to have PHP on the web server machine be able to read in an image file ( using $image = imagecreatefromjpeg($source_filename); ) and then do some work on it, namely some shrinking and "branding", all on the fly. But I can't seem to get this to work. I'm guessing it might be permissions, or the way I'm specifying the path, but I'm unsure how to figure out what's wrong. I've tried an alias of the FMS's images folder in the PHP directory (which works using the Finder) and I tried afp://username:password@FMSMachine...etc. for the file name. It's easy to get the actual path to the needed image file in FileMaker and pass it through FX.php to the web server, but I can't get the file.

Any thoughts?

BTW, Chris's new grammar handling is still working flawlessly, which is why I'm finally moving forward.

-Troy