I’m glad to find your blog. We manufacture MFi certified barcode scanner called iScan. We have recevied several inquiries wanting to use a barcode scanner to work with their iDevices and FileMaker Go to create a warehouse/inventory management solution.

We know the demand for barcode scanner + FileMaker Go is high and I’d like to know if you are interested in exploring a partnership opportunity. thank you.

Damian

Unfortunately pushing a blank from FileMaker through ESS changes blank to NULL so you have to use a space or some dirty hack…

Oh dear, this is going to make my life really difficult…

Is it REALLY not possible to put an empty string into a MySQL field at all via ESS?

It sounds to me that the most elegant solution would be to make triggers on the MySQL side so that everything works from FileMaker just as you would expect it to, without any unnecessary

In the simplest form you could just replace NULL with an empty string, in the trigger, couldn’t you?

If necessary, FileMaker could also send an encoded string (e.g.: "<"">") so that the trigger really knows it is a prompt from FileMaker to enter an empty string.

I think it is a HUGE omission from the techbrief_ess_fm11_en.pdf that they do not mention in the section “Miscellaneous Limitations of ESS” that you can’t write an empty string to a (My)SQL Database field using ESS!

Unfortunately just putting the string NULL is doesn’t help as the SQL just sees the string.

If you put “” into a FileMaker shadow table field then ESS will change that to a MySQL NULL but that stops you putting an empty value into a MySQL field through ESS. So if you have a MySQL field defined as NOT NULL and you want to put empty into the field through ESS you are stuck.

What would be the effect of having FM auto-enter “NULL” as a literal.
Could the SQL interpret or auto-enter-calculate NULL?

From a long-term FileMaker developer I like the fact that when a field is empty … it is empty. I have, however, played in this fm>sql>fm loop a number of times so I love to understand more.

cheers
Lyndsay

Using prepared statements is pretty easily in FileMaker too. The SQL for the prepared statement is formed the same way as Tabitha’s example and executed directly through the perform SQL script step. Unfortunately though there is no way to leverage this when using ESS.

For ESS speed improvements consider using views and triggers. I detailed this in another blog post here:http://www.linearchat.co.uk/2011/02/mysql-optimisation-strategies-to-improve-ess-performance/

I’m afraid I can’t help you with FileMaker – I’m helping out with the web dev side of things and have only used PHP and MySQL. One of the FileMaker guys might know something though.

Glad you liked the post.