By bones on

I currently have a file maker pro database of people, and am now setting up a drupal website for these people.
I am approving them by hand at the moment, checking their name is in the database and then applying a role based on the info in the database. I am happy doing this because I only thought I would need to do it once. Now I have realised that some of their roles might change, this will not happen often however and will be a small proportion of the users.
I would like to be able to some how compare the two databases and produce a report that I can then examine to change the required roles. I am not sure how to go about this however and was wondering if anyone had any starting points or might have done something similar.
The solution does not need to be neat, so it could involve creating csv files or something.
Any hints on this would be great
Thanks in advance

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.7.x

Comments

jrc’s picture

jrc commented

It's been a while since I've done any Filemaker consulting, but I hear that they just released an API for PHP. If so, I would imagine that they have a DBI for PHP to connect to Filemaker, likely using ODBC. You could code a Drupal module to connect to both databases and perform your comparison work. Else, you might look at the problem from the system level and ask if the comparison is even necessary. Your description did not provide enough detail to get a sense of exactly what data you need to compare and for what business purpose. But I would imagine that it would not be hard to get a current version of Filemaker to talk with PHP.

bones’s picture

bones commented

Thanks,
I had realised that already, however we dont have the newest version of filemaker and also do not use filemaker server, so this makes that less possible. I think my best option is to export required data to csv files and then write a module to compare this to current users, or update users. I have found user_import.module which imports users from csv, however it has no way of updating/comparing users. I think this offers a good base to write a module as it does the import bit very well. As the databases do not need to be synced very often, due to the data remaining static until certain dates when it all changes.
If any one as achieved anything similar it would be good to know. I have not described the data as it is confusing and I find it difficult to describe the nature and structure of it! If it will help I can give it a go.