Troi File 2.2

Tuesday 28th August, 2001

We last looked at Troi’s File plug-in last year (see Reviews, 15 September 2000, p31) and it’s since had two slight revisions. Even then it provided formidable functions from within FileMaker calculations: choosing, reading, writing, creating and deleting files, getting and setting file and folder attributes, choosing, deleting and listing folders and their contents and listing and unmounting disks. Quite a list.

Since then, Troi has managed to expand this list with some image specific utilities. Mimicking the image import functionality within FileMaker itself, there’s now a ‘ReferenceToClip’ function that lets you import a picture (in GIF, JPEG, PICT, TIFF or EPS formats) into a container field, and store a reference to it. This allows the end user to work with very large numbers of images in the databases without the databases growing to gigabyte proportions. In addition, there’s also a ‘ThumbnailToClip’ function that takes a file containing an image and creates a thumbnail of it.

Super Fat farm One of the bugbears with version 2.0 of the plug-in was that it wasn’t consistent in its use of dialog boxes. For some requests you were shown the new resizable, folder-friendly Navigation Services dialog boxes, and for others you had to make do with plain old System 8.0 dialog boxes. Version 2.2 has no such problems, so all your boxes default to Navigation Services if they’re available on the system you’re using.

The main reason for this upgrade, is that Troi File 2.2 has been rewritten to be a ‘Super Fat’ plug-in so that it will run on Mac OS 8, 9 and Mac OS X, as well as being FileMaker 5.5 compatible. On the whole, this works seamlessly. However, the example files are not as clear cut due to the way OS X works with file and creator types.

Some of the examples need a little work. If you use the built in Quartz engine for creating PDFs, then they don’t have the same file types as Acrobat or PDFWriter created documents, and thus aren’t available to choose in the file-type specific dialogs in the example code.

If you don’t realise this, or if you haven’t used the examples before, this could be frustrating, especially since the code is actually doing exactly what it’s being asked to do. This is a small niggle, however, and the 57-page user guides and the overall quality of the other nine example files make up for it.

PRICE: Single-user license $42, Developer Single Platform $199, Developer Cross Platform $319 - Upgrade $19, Upgrade X-Platform Developer $79

Verdict

Troi File 2.2 has been rewritten to be a ‘Super Fat’ plug-in so that it will run on Mac OS 8, 9 and Mac OS X, as well as being FileMaker 5.5 compatible