Building Database with Filemaker

Scripting Forums AppleScript | Classic Mac OS
#1

[color=darkblue]I’m creating a college student records database with Filemaker 4.0 that involves several files and eventually will be accessed by web.

1st Q: Is it worth it to upgrade to Filemaker Pro 6 to be use for the web? How is 6 compared to 4?

2nd Q: Should I have several files corresponding to each form/document that a student submits or combine them all into one file? In addition, what is the rule of thumb on the number of fields for one file? In other words, what is the maximum number of fields I should have in one file?

3rd Q: Once I’m ready to put the database onto web. How can I make the database safe and isolate the web user only to his or her record rather than browsing through the whole database.

4th Q: One thought was to write a script to prompt the user to indicate New or Registered user:

the user selects New then the script would duplicate a database template,
the script would rename it to the file name containing student ID and password,
the script would prompt user to set the password for the new file
and when the student completes the online form, the data is collected by the main database file(s).

Is this the right approach? How can I accomplish this?

Thanks,
Ronny[/color]

#2

Ronny,

You are asking specific FileMaker questions that really don’t touch on applescript. While there are a great many FileMaker guru’s out here, you’d probably have better luck posting to a FileMaker forum. I would recommend upgrading to FM 6 though for what you are planning to use it for.

Check out [url=http://forum.filemakerworld.com/]http://forum.filemakerworld.com/[/url]

Good luck Ronny!

#3

Unless you don’t want to spend a lot of money. FileMaker 4 allows unlimited web-sharing, while the regular version of FileMaker 6 only allows 10 different people to use it per day (based on IP address for web-sharing). If you needed a lot of different people (computers) to access your database through the web, you’d need to buy FileMaker 6 Unlimited, for about $1000 US.

Something to think about, if what you are doing is not extremely complicated, and needs to be cheap.

#4

for great suggestions