For those of you interested in bridging a Filemaker database with
contacts to the Address Book, my script for synchronizing a FileMaker
contacts list with Address Book has been updated to FileMaker 8, made
much much faster, and had a few bugs corrected.
Note that this is NOT a generic script. It cannot be run out of the box.
To make configuration easier I use the convention of having a
FileMaker field name be exactly the same as the corresponding Address
Book name. It relies on the FileMaker database having a field called
"Address Book id" (text), "DoNotSynch" (if non-blank the FileMaker
record will be ignored) and "modification date and time"
(auto-updated timestamp). A global field "gLastAddressBookSynch" is
also required (text).
There must be one layout in your database with all these fields
present. It's best to create a table instance as well, so that the
script doesn't mess with the current find set and sort order of table
instances used in your UI.
Note that the field names are configurable in the script along with
the names of the database/document/window/table/layout.
So it will take a bit of work to adapt to your situation, but
hopefully it's fairly obvious for "those skilled in the art".
Comments and bug reports welcome, but no, this does not come with
24/7 customer service.
Performance: For a database/Address Book with almost 2000 records and
no updates required the scan takes just over one minute on a 1.67 GHz
PowerPC G4. If doing an initial scan where the entire contents of a
database have to be copied into Address Book (or vice versa) please
go have a coffee. In normal operation, the synchronization won't have
many records to update so the timing shouldn't be much longer than a
scan where no changes are required.
