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FileMaker Konferenz 2025 in Hamburg

Noch sieben Monate: Vom 14. bis 17. September 2025 findet die nächste deutschsprachige FileMaker Konferenz in Hamburg, Deutschland statt. Das JUFA Hotel Hamburg HafenCity liegt direkt neben dem Ausgang der U-Bahn Station HafenCity Universität, nur drei Stationen vom Hauptbahnhof via U4, so dass sich die Anreise per Bahn empfiehlt. FileMaker Anwender und Entwickler können ihre Teilnahme buchen.

Anmeldung mit Frühbucherrabatt

Bitte melden Sie sich an, wenn Sie Interesse an der Konferenz haben. Bis zum 30. April 2025 gibt es den Frühbucherrabatt.

Möchten Sie Sponsor oder Sprecher werden?

Aktuell sucht der FMK Verein Vorschläge für interessante Vorträge.

Die Veranstalter vom Verein FM Konferenz erwarten auch 2025 rund 120 Entwickler, Anwender, IT-Fachleute und Entscheidungsträger aus Wirtschaft, Bildung und Verwaltung. Rund um über 25 Fachvorträge und Workshops wird es viel Zeit zum Vernetzen in den gemeinsamen Pausen und beim Abendprogramm geben.

MBS Beitrag

Wir werden wieder ein paar Vorträge beisteuern. Darunter was es neues im MBS Plugin gibt und vermutlich etwas für neue Entwickler. Aktuell steht noch nicht fest, ob es ein Vorprogramm gibt. Bitte meldet euch, wenn ihr Interesse an einem MBS Workshop Tag vorher/nachher habt.


Read system information on Linux

For the 15.1 version of MBS FileMaker Plugin, we made a little change to Text.ReadTextFile to be able to read from /proc directory on Linux. This way you can read various system things. There are hundreds of things you can read there, so let us show you a few useful picks:

Memory Information

The meminfo entry provides information about memory utilization. This varies for different linux versions, but you should be able to query the text and find the entries you like.

Set Variable [ $meminfo ; Value: MBS("Text.ReadTextFile"; "/proc/meminfo") ]

The MemTotal is the total memory in the system. MemFree would be the free memory, but on a Linux system free memory is a waste as every free page could be used for file caching. So MemAvailable defines how much memory is available for use, which includes the free memory, but also memory that could be freed dirctely like file caches. Unevictable shows how much memory can't be moved to swap. You may use these values to calculate some memory statistics and watch it over time.

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MBS Xojo Plugins, version 25.1pr2

New in this prerelease of the 25.0 plugins:
  • Added optional Names parameter to BuiltInCurves function in ECKeyMBS class.
  • Added CurveNameToID function to ECKeyMBS class.
  • Added ES256Verify and ES256Sign functions to ECKeyMBS class.
  • Added CustomerID property to DynaPDFMBS class.
  • Added Failed event to WebView2ControlMBS control to report when a WebView2 could not be created.
  • Improved GZipMBS class to handle unicode characters in the file path.
  • Updated CURL library to version 8.12.0.
  • Warning: CURL 8.12 has a bug with STARTTLS for SMTP causing a server timeout. We implemented a workaround until an official fix is available.
Download: monkeybreadsoftware.de/xojo/download/plugin/Prerelease/.
Or ask us to be added to our shared DropBox folder.

You can subscribe to our Xojo mailing list to get notified for new pre-release and release versions.


MBS FileMaker Plugin, version 15.1pr2

New in this prerelease of version 15.1 of the MBS FileMaker Plugin: Download at monkeybreadsoftware.com/filemaker/files/Prerelease/

You can subscribe to our FileMaker mailing list to get notified for new pre-release and release versions.


Differences between old and new Excel file format

I got asked what the differences between XLS and XSLX formats are for our LibXL functionality. Some of the features are only available if you opted for the new or old format. In general we nowadays prefer the newer XLSX format based on XML.

Here is a table to compare:

WhatXLSXLSX
File FormatBinary Interchange File Format (BIFF)Office Open XML Format
CompatibilityReadable by all Microsoft Excel versionsReadable by Excel 2007 and later versions
Rowsup to 65,536 rowsup to 1,048,576 rows
Columnsup to 256 columnsup to 16,384 columns
FormulasSupports older Excel functionsBetter compatibility with newer Microsoft Excel functions
(such as IFERROR, XLOOKUP, TEXTAFTER)
Maximum Number of Fonts50465429
Conditions Formatsnoyes
Picturesyesyes
Picture Linksnoyes
Cell Commentsyesno
Auto Filternoyes
Data Validationnoyes
Form Controlsnoyes

Check out the XL functions for our MBS FileMaker Plugin and the XL classes in our MBS Xojo Plugins, which allow you to read and write Microsoft Excel files using LibXL library.


MBS Xojo Plugins, version 25.1pr1

New in this prerelease of the 25.0 plugins:
  • Added AddSysPath method to PythonMBS class.
  • Added AvahiAddressResolverMBS, AvahiEntryGroupMBS, AvahiHostNameResolverMBS and AvahiRecordBrowserMBS classes.
  • Added mitigation against buffer overflow in Windows for snprintf function.
  • Added more methods and properties for AVCaptureDeviceMBS class.
  • Added PHPickerControlMBS control.
  • Added ReverseMBS function for arrays.
  • Added SetLicense, License and ClearLicense methods for SaxonMBS module.
  • Added SourceWithoutAttachments method to MimeEmailMBS class.
  • Added State property to AvahiClientMBS class.
  • Added View and ViewController properties to PHPickerViewControllerMBS class.
  • Added WindowsAVIWriteMBS class.
  • Changed SetLicenseKey in XLBookMBS class to raise exception if you pass invalid license, e.g. Windows license on macOS, instead of ignoring it.
  • Fixed a memory leak in AddInkList, InkAnnot and SetAnnotQuadPoints methods in DynaPDFMBS class.
  • Fixed a memory leak of a DynaPDFRectMBS object when calling UpdateWindow event in DynaPDFRasterImageMBS class.
  • Fixed crash in SortByFileName method in FileListMBS class introduced in v25.0.
  • Fixed PopOverWidth and PopOverHeight for PHPickerViewControllerMBS class.
  • Improved MidiPlaybackMBS class to raise exceptions if it wasn't initialized properly.
  • Improved Optimize() function in DynaPDFMBS class to automatically set kofInMemory flag if you have no open file.
  • Improved TrueItemsMBS function to be quicker.
  • Removed dependency to CXXABI_1.3.13 for Linux, introduced in 15.0.
  • Updated DynaPDF library to version 4.0.97.274.
  • Updated lcms library to version 2.17rc0.
  • Updated SQLite to version 3.48.0.
  • Updated avahi library.
  • Improved setting Baudrate in SerialPortMBS class to not try to change if the baud rate if the old and new rate are the same.
  • Implemented keep alive for MQTT feature in CURLSMBS class. Use OptionTCPKeepAlive property to enable.
Download: monkeybreadsoftware.de/xojo/download/plugin/Prerelease/.
Or ask us to be added to our shared DropBox folder.

You can subscribe to our Xojo mailing list to get notified for new pre-release and release versions.


MBS FileMaker Plugin, version 15.1pr1

New in this prerelease of version 15.1 of the MBS FileMaker Plugin: Download at monkeybreadsoftware.com/filemaker/files/Prerelease/

You can subscribe to our FileMaker mailing list to get notified for new pre-release and release versions.


Learn more about FileMaker and AI

I just finished the course and certification for

AI Fundamentals I: Semantic search in Claris FileMaker Associate

and I got a nice badge. This is the eighth one as I did all the certifications for Claris Academy so far. You can do this too and learn more about FileMaker!

For more training, check out the Claris FileMaker for Beginners training at FMTraining.tv. You can watch live when they record for free and ask questions. Or just pay for a course and watch the recordings.

If you prefer in-person training, how about joining Claris Engage conference? There is a training day after the conference on 27th March 2024 in Austin, Texas. And you can do the combi ticket for 2 day conference and the training day.

See you in Austin! Or at one of the other FileMaker conferences.

The failure of Digital River's MyCommerce platform, Update

You may have read about The failure of Digital River's MyCommerce platform.

The saga continues. As of today we still wait for over 100.000 Euro from them. But they fired everyone in Germany and the company is just a letter box on an office building. Mail seems to be scanned in and send to some company using AI to write their answers. Only empty promises and no real answers or accountability.

In the last days a few customers contacted us to get invoices for their purchase. At the time of order, they got one by email. But that email may have been lost in the spam folder earlier this year.

If you need an invoice, you can contact ordersupport@mycommerce.com with your order number, purchase date and name, so they can find it and send the invoice again. If and only if, someone still works there, reads the emails and actual is willing to help you. We don't have a copy of the invoices, so we can't help you. You can look into your backups for one of the order date and look if you find something in the spam folder. If you can't find the invoice, you can print the email about the order.

As of 28th January 2025, it looks like the company filed for bankruptcy. Since all the money is probably moved out of the company already and it loaded with debt, the administrator won't have much fun there. And once the computer systems get shutdown, the invoices may get lost anyway.

Well, if you like to support us, please consider ordering a license. New sales go through FastSpring or 2checkout unless you pay us directly. Thank you for your support.

Save money with multi year updates

You can pay for renewals for FileMaker licenses and MBS Plugin in advance to secure the current prices and get a discount. License prices may change in the future, so why not lock them in now?

For FileMaker licenses there are graduated prices, so it may be good to ask for 3 or 5 years when renewing. You could also just decide to renew now and append more years to the license today. If you renew, you may also qualify for a discount, e.g. 10% for second year and 20% for following years. (more)

FileMaker Conferences in 2025

We'd love to meet you at one of the various FileMaker conferences. Let us show you:

The next conference is Claris Engage in two months, the official one from Claris themselves. Stefanie and I are signed up and will be there. If you have questions about the MBS Plugin, please stop us in the hallways and chat with us. We skip the booth this year as we like to enjoy the sessions ourselves and prefer to wander around instead of sitting on the 5th floor. If you like to join, there are still a few tickets available for the early bird pricing.

(more)

MBS @ FMTraining.TV - 25 Ways to Improve Your Database Using the FileMaker MonkeyBread Plug-in - Day 3

Check out the FMTraining.tv website. Richard Carlton and his team do a daily free live stream about FileMaker to watch.

A few days ago Christian Schmitz from Monkeybread Software joined a live episode to talk a bit about the MBS FileMaker Plugin. Watch it on YouTube.

We walk over some of the doors of our advent calendar. We talk about ics files, HotkeyWIA, WindowsOCR, ImageCapture, ContinuityCamera, AVRecorder, Printer, PrintDialog, PagesetupDialog and AppleScript functions.

(more)

MBS @ FMTraining.TV - 25 Ways to Improve Your Database Using the FileMaker MonkeyBread Plug-in - Day 2

Check out the FMTraining.tv website. Richard Carlton and his team do a daily free live stream about FileMaker to watch.

A few days ago Christian Schmitz from Monkeybread Software joined a live episode to talk a bit about the MBS FileMaker Plugin. Watch it on YouTube.

We walk over some of the doors of our advent calendar. We talk about CURL, DynaPDF, MapView, SendMail, SharingService, XML, Calendar and UNNotification functions.

(more)

News from the MBS Xojo Plugins Version 25.0

In this article I want to introduce you the new functionalities from the MBS Xojo Plugins in version 25.0.

Saxon

A completely new area that we plan to further expand in the next releases is the connection to the Saxon library. Saxon is a widely used and high-performance software library that specializes in the processing and transformation of XML and XSLT data. It enables developers to manipulate data efficiently and convert it into the desired formats. We would now like to make these functionalities from the library available to you in Xojo. We have already included some functionalities in this release, but there will certainly be more to come in the near future. To find out what the MBS Xojo XML Plugin can already do, please have a look at the blog article Saxon in MBS Xojo XML Plugin

(more)

MBS @ FMTraining.TV - 15.0 MonkeyBread FileMaker Plug-in Release with Christian Schmitz

Check out the FMTraining.tv website. Richard Carlton and his team do a daily free live stream about FileMaker to watch.

A few days ago Christian Schmitz from Monkeybread Software joined a live episode to talk a bit about the MBS FileMaker Plugin. Watch it on YouTube.

We talk about the 15.0 release of the MBS Plugin for FileMaker. See Announcement, Release Notes and new functions. See ImagePlayground, Saxon, XL and Shell functions.

(more)

New in MBS FileMaker Plugin 15.0

In this article we want to introduce you the new functions from the MBS FileMaker Plugin in version 15.0.

Saxon

A completely new area that we plan to further expand in the next releases is the connection to the Saxon library. Saxon is a widely used and high-performance software library that specializes in the processing and transformation of XML and XSLT data. It enables developers to manipulate data efficiently and convert it into the desired formats. We would now make these functions from the library available to you in FileMaker. We have already included several functions in this release, but there will certainly be more to come in the future. To find out what the plugin can already do, take a look at the blog article Saxon in MBS FileMaker Plugin

(more)

Send SMS with Amazon web service

You can use various Amazon web services in FileMaker using our CURL functions in MBS FileMaker Plugin. You need to build the URL and her payload and either pass data in the URL or as POST data, depending on the service. You may easily translate an existing sample call on the AWS documentation for the call you like to make and translate that to setting the various options.

 

The special thing for the AWS requests is the signature to properly encode and hash the credentials. For years we have CURL.SetupAWS function to help signing the requests. But since CURL got the AWSSigV4 Option, we can use our CURL.SetOptionAWSSigV4 function to sign the request on the fly. There we pass the names of the provider, region and service, so CURL can include this in the signature.

 

To try this, let us use the Amazon Simple Notification Service to send a text message to a mobile phone. For this we need a phone number and since people like to use brackets and spaces, we filter the text to only have the digits and the plus symbol for the country.

(more)

MBS @ FMTraining.TV - 25 Ways to Improve Your Database Using the FileMaker MonkeyBread Plug-in - Day 1

Check out the FMTraining.tv website. Richard Carlton and his team do a daily free live stream about FileMaker to watch.

A few days ago Christian Schmitz from Monkeybread Software joined a live episode to talk a bit about the MBS FileMaker Plugin. Watch it on YouTube.

We walk over some of the doors of our advent calendar. We talk about installation, DragDrop, DynaPDF, Contacts, web services and archive functions.

(more)

Using static analyzer for Xojo Plugin development

In Xcode we enjoy some automatic analyzer features to find memory leaks for CoreFoundation and Cocoa object. I used them in the past to find leaks related to various objects in the code. In the last months, I got to use these for our Xojo objects and strings.

I defined my own function annotations to inform the compiler whether the function returns a REALobject or REALstring with +1 reference count or +0 reference count.

To give you an idea how many annotations I needed, here are the numbers:

REALOBJECT_RETURNS_RETAINED13012
REALOBJECT_RETURNS_NOT_RETAINED17
REALSTRING_RETURNS_RETAINED2814
REALSTRING_RETURNS_NOT_RETAINED7

Once the annotations work, we use analyze command in Xcode to find issues. I setup an example for you:



The functions NewDictionary, REALNewVariantString, REALNewVariantInteger, CString2RB and many others are annotated to return a retained object. Xcode can report that we allocated a dictionary, a string and objects in the method. And since we don't free them, it can complain.

Adding this took months and on the way, I found a couple of memory leaks. Mostly in edge cases where memory was not released property on case of an exception or with a lot of nested branches.

In future we will enjoy this and I hope it helps us ship less memory leaks.

MBS Plugin 15.0 for Claris FileMaker

Nickenich, Germany - (January 14th, 2025) -- Monkeybread Software today is pleased to announce MBS FileMaker Plugin 15.0 for Claris FileMaker for macOS, iOS, Linux and Windows, the latest update to their product that is easily the most powerful plugin currently available for Claris FileMaker produce line. As the leading database management solution for Windows, macOS, iOS and the web, the Claris FileMaker Pro Integrated Development Environment supports a plugin architecture that can easily extend the feature set of the application. MBS FileMaker Plugin 15.0 has been updated and now includes over 7500 different functions, and the versatile plugin has gained more new functions:

For macOS Sequoia we like to use more of Apple Intelligence. As part of that you can show the image playground window. The user can generate a picture based on a prompt and an input image using our ImagePlayground functions.

We work on integrating the Saxon XML processing libraries into FileMaker. Once completed this will allow you to use XSLT 3.0 for transformations, XQuery 3.1 for queries, XSD 1.1 for document validation and XPath 3.1 for navigation within documents. This version includes a preview of the functions for you to try.

For DynaPDF we got the DynaPDF.CheckEmbeddedFileCheckSum function to validate whether a checksum for an embedded file inside a PDF is valid. The DynaPDF.ConvToFreeTextCallout allows you to convert a regular FreeText annotation to a FreeTextCallout annotation. And with DynaPDF.DeleteOutputIntent you can delete an output intent, e.g. if you like to define a different colorspace as output intent.

For the menubar we sort the hidden window list alphabetically. We improved the auto complete feature for custom functions and added a checkbox for it to the preferences dialog.

We improved our field picker enhancements in FileMaker to work in more places. We show you details for a field in the tooltip and show the arrow control on the top right to jump to the last used table occurence. The SyntaxColoring.AddContextMenuCommand function can add context menu commands for layout and browse mode instead of just Script Workspace.

In XL functions we added ways to get and set properties for a document like title or subject. You can also remove the properties and query the default format for a row or column. The XL.Sheet.CellWriteTexts function can optionally use blank cells for empty texts.

For macOS we can set key equivalents for our dialog boxes for each button using Dialog.SetKeyEquivalent. The AVAsset.TrackInfo function can query format information and Process.LoadFramework function can explicitly load a macOS framework.

The DragDrop.GetPathList function returns the list of all paths received. We added JSON.SetVariables and JSON.ClearVariables to match similar XML functions, we allow you to merge output and error streams for shell functions, we added an Archive.IsOpen function and you can set whether audit ignores empty field for creating a record.

Finally we updated the curl library to version 8.11.1, DynaPDF to 4.0.96.273, expat library to 2.6.4, LibXL to 4.5.0, mongo-c-driver to 1.29.1, SQLAPI to 5.3.5, SQLite to 3.47.2, ssh2 to 1.11.1, taglib to 2.0.2, zlib to 1.3.1 and zxing to version 2.3.

See release notes for a complete list of changes.


Older blog entries:

2025-01-14 MonkeyBread Software Releases the MBS Xojo Plugins in version 25.0
2025-01-14 Neues MBS Plugin 15.0 für Claris FileMaker
2025-01-13 Intercept Menus with MBS Xojo Plugins
2025-01-13 Things to do for the new year
2025-01-11 News from the MBS Xojo Plugins in version 24.5
2025-01-10 xDev Magazine 23.1
2025-01-10 MBS FileMaker Plugin, version 15.0pr9
2025-01-10 MBS Xojo Plugins, version 25.0pr9
2025-01-09 25 Years Monkeybread Software Party
2025-01-08 New in MBS FileMaker Plugin in Version 14.5
2025-01-07 Saxon in MBS Xojo XML Plugin
2025-01-07 Saxon in MBS FileMaker Plugin
2025-01-07 MBS Xojo Plugins, version 25.0pr8
2025-01-07 MBS FileMaker Plugin, version 15.0pr8
2025-01-06 Backup Requirements
2025-01-05 Our statistics for FileMaker
2025-01-04 MBS Plugin Advent Calendar
2025-01-01 MBS Xojo Plugins, version 25.0pr7
2025-01-01 MBS FileMaker Plugin, version 15.0pr7
2024-12-30 Year 2024 in review

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