Internal ID
Friday, October 2, 2009 at 6:38AM Internal ID
CATEGORY: Advanced Design
CLASS: Working With FileMaker
Under the hood, FileMaker assigns a collection of internal IDs. Unfortunately, they are not that easy to get to and are a bit of a pain to extract for the developer.
Internal Record IDs
FileMaker creates an internal record ID for the records it contains in its files. The Get(RecordID) function will return the FileMaker created and internally stored record ID for the current record in the foreground window. Since these numbers are internal to FileMaker, they are always sequential, unique and never reused if the record is deleted.
Internal Layout IDs
FileMaker assigns an unique, internal identification value to each new layout added in a file. Unlike the layout name or layout position, the FileMaker developer does not have access to edit this largely hidden value. The design function of LayoutIDs provides a return separated list of all the internal layout ids for a particular file. There is just one parameter for this function and that is the name of the file you want to target for the returned list of layout IDs.
Internal Script IDs
When scripts are created in a file, they are given a unique and sequential script id tag. When a script is deleted, that scripts id tag will not be repeated. The ScriptIDs function will return those id tags in the order the scripts are currently organized within the file. The script ids will be return delimited, that is to say there will be a carriage return between each id. So if you have 12 scripts, create one and move it to the top ... that script will have a 13 and it will be on the top row of the returned array.
© 2010 - Dwayne Wright - dwaynewright.com
The material on this document is offered AS IS. FileMaker Pro is the registered trademark of FileMaker Inc.
Reader Comments (2)
Hi I have been looking at these internal ID's but I am using a mysql database. When I do a snapshot link and look at the XML it is looking for a ForeignID. Is there a way to get this ID in Filemaker.
I am looking for a way to generate the snap shot XML via php but need to work out the ID to pass it
There may be a way to do it but it is beyond my skills (which are nonexistent for PHP). You might want to try posting the request to some of the popular FileMaker forums or joining FileMaker TechNet.
Dwayne