Back Into The 360WORKS Email Saddle Again

From Dwayne Wright - Certified FileMaker 9 Developer
WEB: www.dwaynewright.com
EMAIL: info@dwaynewright.com
TWITTER: dwaynewright

Sometime during the third week of January (2009), my business simply exploded. I sold numerous copies of my InBizness FileMaker CRM product and most of those customers purchased customization services as well. My time for daily blogging simply vanished and I'm still under the gun. Before the deluge happened, I was working on a series of posts about the 360Works email plug-in and it has bothered me that I haven't made incremental progress on those. Today I reached an action item in which one of my clients wants to have InBizness automatically import email receipts from their online shopping cart and build sales orders from them.

It has been a couple months since I worked with the 360Works email plug-in and that is one great acid test for a plug-in. How difficult is it to pick up the ball again and start running with it? For me, I spent more time finding the example file I was working on, than it took to wire it up to my clients email address. You can see a series of links about my example file at the end of this post.

In order to test the plug-in with my clients email account ... I simply plugged in the email server address, the email address and the password. Hit the button that I had built back when the current year ended with an eight ... and ... it worked! I tweaked a few other things about the example file but then realized I had real work to do! I need to take this and integrate it into InBizness for my client. This is also a feature that I'll want to include in the next update of InBizness.

SO WHAT ABOUT FILEMAKER 10?
All my active development for the next release of InBizness is being done in FileMaker 10 and all my client work is being done in FileMaker 9. That will change soon because I have a client that really needs the script trigger and active report features of FileMaker 10. Right now, I'm using a Macintosh that is running FileMaker 10 and FileMaker 9 at the same time. My development version of InBizness is the same one that I use to run my business. So all my client timecard tracking is done there. Besides my timecard tracking, there is another benefit to this step. I can copy and paste code between the two versions of FMP9 and FMP10. So I tend to prototype new features in my FileMaker 10 development version of InBizness and test it there. Then I copy the code over to my clients version of InBizness, test it and then release that version to my clients. Works pretty well but I wondered about the 360Works compatibility with FileMaker 10.

CRUISING OVER TO THE 360WORKS WEB SITE
So my version of the email plug-in is 1.81 and I need to see what the current version is. I navigate over to the page dedicated to the email plug-in (found here) and in the right hand side I see that the current version is 1.86. So I've missed out on five updates and I'm thinking I might need to follow this a little closer. If I release this plug-in with my product, that may be a very good idea. I wonder what 360Works has in regards to notifying their customers of plug-in updates. I went ahead and clicked the link for the users that own a license and about to give it a go.

Here you can see what was downloaded.

Being the curious sort, I opened up the ChangeLog.txt file and found the following about the updates I missed.

Version 1.86
* Improved unicode support for attachment names when attachments are stored as container references.

Version 1.85
* Improved unicode support for plain-text messages with accent characters, foreign characters.

Version 1.84 (1/28/2009)
* Fixed compatibility issues with running on Server 10 and IWP

Version 1.83 (1/13/2009)
* Explicitly sends a sent-date header, to address complaints from SMTP servers about missing DATE header
* Added "count" option for EmailReadMessageValue, this returns the total number of messages fetched from the server. Useful for progress bars.

Version 1.82 (12/28/2008)
* Fixed IMAP message retrieval by uid for gmail servers, bug which caused incorrect uids to be used. Update to this version is you are using UID-based IMAP fetches!

The last two updates don't have a date attached to them but it still looks like an update has been rolling out every couple weeks or so. Only two of them seems to address a fix and only one of them is remotely FileMaker 10 related. I'm not going to use the plug-in with IWP yet, but good to know they are on the ball with updates for that feature! Everything else seems to be a set of self actualization improvements, that is good to know as well!

POPPING THE PLUG-IN INTO FILEMAKER 10
I quit out of FMP10 and cruise over to my FileMaker 10 folder to install the plug-in. Here I get a little freaked out about what I find. I have multiple copies of extension folders where my plug-in is supposed to go. What the heck is up with that? The five copies of the extensions folder are all empty, so I make a command decision to delete them.

Here you can see my extension folder seems to have replicated itself on January 9th, what weird mojo went on that day?

My example file has my license information within it for startup, so I close it from my FileMaker 9 application and open it up in FileMaker 10. I wander over to the development tab in the example file and see if my registration was successful on startup. This is logic I copied directly over from the 360Works example file. Houston, we DO NOT appear to have a problem. The plug-in reports that my registration was successful and verifies that I have the latest version! That is about as smooth of a process as you can expect for a plug-in experience.

Here is something that continues to be funny to me. I open up my example file in FileMaker 10 and get annoyed almost immediately. My thoughts are "Why did this open with the status area missing?" and I click the show status area button. Then realize this is FileMaker 10, I don’t have the benefit of a status area, click the button again and proceed to my FileMaker 10 arch enemy (the status bar). Yes, I'm firmly entrenched in the "hate it" camp for all things status bar related but what is a poor developer to do? In my case, my only option is to mutter a “dab nab it” and travel all the way up to the top of the monitor for everything I need to do.

Back to the discussion about the plug-in compatibility ... sorry about the mini rant ... I click the button to download the emails and it works like a charm! It worked exactly the same as the FileMaker 9 experience and mentally I stand up and do a quick snoopy dance. Next up, integrating the 360Works plug-in into InBizness. I'm going to start on that right after taking a Wii Fit yoga break.

Here are some links to other posts that might be of interest in regards to this topic...
External Functions Registering Your Plug-in
Custom Function - Name On Email
A Friday Afternoon With The 360Works Email Plug-In
Constant Relationship Portals And Tab Panels
Looping Script To Clean Email Addresses
Extraction, Transformation And Loading Process Explored


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More info about the author and FileMaker in general, contact me at info@dwaynewright.com.

© 2009 - Dwayne Wright - dwaynewright.com

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