Clipboard workflow for XML edits

Products, Plugins & FM hosting/cloud services MBS Plugins
1

Any idea that was raised recently on FM Slug slack group….

A developer was copying layout object XML to clipboard , editing it in BBEdit, and then converting it back to FM Clipboard format to paste back to layout, in order to make batch changes to objects.

While MBS does copy FM objects to the text clipboard as XML automatically , it does not offer (as far as I’m aware) a way to take said text and convert back to FM object for re-pasting when done.

However, more specifically as for a feature, now that we’ve seen what can be done with MBS with respect to the new script search window, it begs the question whether we could have an XML editing window able to be used within the plugin.

The scenario:

  1. user copies some FM object schema to clipboard

  2. There is a button/shortcut somewhere to invoke an XML editing dialog. This would be a basic text editor with the schema XML already pasted into the editor.

  3. From there, users can make text adjustments to the code, perhaps some find/replace tools here also..

  4. A button in the window would then copy that XML back onto the FileMaker clipboard, so that user can immediately paste it back into FileMaker.

This would ultimately remove the need for external editing of the XML, and the need to script the conversion back to FM clipboard format.

MBS FileMaker Plugin 16.2 development
2

Good idea.

But you can already copy to the editor and back to FileMaker. We convert the clipboard both ways.