Custom Web Publishing Guide

Chapter 2
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Preparing databases for Custom Web Publishing 21
Web server support for Internet media types (MIME)
Your web server determines the support for the current MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions)
types registered for the Internet. The Web Publishing Engine does not change a web server’s support for
MIME. For more information, see the documentation for your web server.
About publishing the contents of container fields on the web
The contents of a container field, such as an image file, can either be stored inside a FileMaker database, or
stored as a file reference using a relative path.
Note The Web Publishing Engine does not support movie file streaming. Web users must download an
entire movie file before being able to view the movie.
Publishing container field objects stored in a database
If a container field stores the actual files in the FileMaker database, then you don’t need to do anything with
the container field contents if the database file is properly hosted and accessible on FileMaker Server. See
“About the URL syntax for FileMaker container objects in XML solutions” on page 27, and “About the URL
syntax for FileMaker container objects in XSLT solutions” on page 53.
Publishing container field objects stored as a file reference
If a container field stores file references instead of actual files, then you must do the following steps to use
the Web Publishing Engine to publish the container field objects.
Note All QuickTime movies are stored in a container field as a reference.
To publish container field objects that are stored as a file reference:
1. Store the container object files in the Web folder inside the FileMaker Pro folder.
2. In FileMaker Pro, insert the objects into the container field and select the Store only a reference to the file
option.
3. Copy or move the referenced object files in the Web folder to the same relative path location in the root
folder of the web server software.
1 For IIS, move the files to: <root drive>\Inetpub\wwwroot
1 For Apache, move the files to: /Library/WebServer/Documents
Note For container objects stored as file references, your web server must be configured to support the
MIME types for the kinds of files you want to serve, such as movies. For more information, see the
documentation for your web server.
How web users can use container field data
When you publish a database on the web using the Web Publishing Engine, web users can work with data
in container fields in these limited ways:
1 Web users can’t play sounds or display OLE objects in a container field—a graphic is displayed instead.
1 Web users can’t modify or add to the contents of container fields.
1 If your database contains graphics that aren’t in GIF or JPEG format, the Web Publishing Engine creates
a temporary JPEG image when the graphic data is requested by a web browser.