FMChat

Data Detectors

Overview

Data Detectors turn text from your posts into clickable links inside a chat. FM Chat comes with a number of data detectors in place--simple things like recognizing urls, and FedEx tracking, to more complicated examples that point toward what you can do when creating data detectors of your own.

Data detectors are one of the most powerful features of FM Chat; they let chats talk to your FileMaker solutions, web sites, and even other apps. iChat can't do that ;-)

You can watch a video walkthrough of data detectors on youtube.

Creating and editing Data Detectors

You can find the data detectors by clicking "Admin Setup" on the Welcome screen. You'll then see a tab for data detectors on the preferences layout.

Click in the white area of any detector to edit that field; create new detectors by clicking "Add More". Data detectors are shared among all, FM Chat users.

How they work

The detector is described with three fields:

Prefix. This is the string FM Chat will look for in your post to see if that should transform what follows into a link. So we have prefixes for both "http" and "www" because we want to turn both into links.

URL. This is the URL we should construct for you. There are four parameters you can include in the URL (parameters need to be enclosed in brackets as in our examples):

Prefix: described above.

Data: this is any contiguous text found in your post after the prefix. That is, any text not separated by spaces.

HostIP: This will be relocates with the ip address of your FileMaker Server or host and is only needed in those data detectors that need to call scripts in your solution.

FileName: The current filename of the FM Chat file.

Link Displays As. Here you can transform the way the link shows up in the chat, regardless of how it was typed in. In most cases you'll show the prefix and the data, but you don't have to, as in our twitter (hashtag) example.

Tips

The most interesting detectors are those that call scripts in your solution. This is done using FileMaker's fmp:// script protocol. Check out the "approve" and "deny" examples that ship with FM Chat for an example of how you name a script in your file and pass in parameters.