Troubleshooting Errors with FileMaker Server Auto Update plug-ins feature

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I’ve been spending a lot of time recently deploying solutions that require plug-ins and having FileMaker Server distribute them automatically to clients via it’s nifty Auto Update feature. Inevitably you will encounter issues for some clients when attempting to download the plug-in: permissions issues with the plug-ins on the server, not having the plug-in in the correct location etc. They are usually easy to resolve once you know what the error is.

When you write a script to download a plug-in you end up calling the FMSAUC_UpdatePlugIn function. This is a function of the AutoUpdate plugin (yes you need to use an existing FileMaker plug-in to download a plug-in), which thankfully by default is always installed by FileMaker Pro/Pro Advanced (there are only 3 functions for this plug-in: one checks the version (used to see if the plug-in is installed), another to find the plug-in you’re after on the FileMaker Server computer, and the third to download the plug-in). Assuming you have the plug-in installed in the correct location on your FileMaker Server with the appropriate permissions set (see the FileMaker Server 11 Guide to Updating Plug-ins for the full details) you’ll end up calling the FMSAUC_UpdatePlugIn function to initiate the download of the plug-in. If successful this function will return 0 like a normal successful script step, and if unsuccessful it will return an error number in the range of -6 to 101.

I like to capture the error number and if necessary display that to the user along with a more human readable error description. There are some custom functions that you can use to return the description for the error code. For example you capture the error code into a variable using the Get (LastError) function and then pass that to the custom function which will return the error description. For example using the custom function linked above ErrorToEnglish ( 101 ) returns “Record is missing” and saves you the trouble of looking up the error code in FileMaker’s help. However when using the FMSAUC_UpdatePlugIn function you won’t able to use this as it has it’s own list of error codes which overlap with existing list of FileMaker error codes. For example error 101 means “The function call from the client computer to the computer running FileMaker Server failed. The server computer might be running a previous version of FileMaker Server.” when returned by the FMSAUC_UpdatePlugIn function but could return “Record is missing” from the Go to Record/Request/Page script step.

I ended up creating another custom function that you can call when performing the FMSAUC_UpdatePlugIn function that will return the appropriate description for any errors encountered when attempting to download a FileMaker plug-in from FileMaker Server. Note you could also extend the existing ErrorToEnglish custom function to include a 2nd parameter to indicate whether it is a script step or the FMSAUC_UpdatePlugIn you are capturing the error code for, rather than have separate custom functions.