Distributing Mobile Files
How can I best get mobiles files to my users?
FileMaker suggests a couple methods of distributing FMGo files, and while these are OK the first time you distribute a file, they don't work well for distributing new versions of a file already on your users' iPhone or iPad.
The first time.
So, for getting that first file out, you can email the file to your mobile users. This works great as your user will see the file in their email on the iPhone or iPad and, when clicking on it, will have the option to open the file in FMGo.
Updating the file once your users have it.
Once your users have your mobile file, they can use the update mechanism built into GoZync to get new versions. This will allow them to download new versions of the file from your server and will replace the file they already have with the new version. Our scripts for managing this in the mobile file make sure there are no data records in the mobile file that haven't been sent to the server before it will let users download a new version.
You can control this behavior in your copy of the mobile file by editing the script "Is a new version permitted".
Preparing a new file for your mobile users.
When you've got a new version ready for your users, select the layout "Under the hood / Utilities / New File Prep" and you'll see a button "File Prep and Upload". Click this and GoZync will load a a copy of this file up to the GoZync file on your server.
(You'll likely want to remove this layout from the layout menu before distributing the file to your users.)
When you click this, not only do we upload a new copy of the file to your server, incrementing the build number, but we (optionally) clear all the data from it. Now you may want this file to contain some data when you're users receive it, so edit the script "Prep File" to change how existing records are treated when the mobile file is moved to the server.
Note that if you want each of your users to get a different set of records on their mobile file, you won't leave those records in the mobile file when you upload it. Rather, you'll ask that your mobile users pull that data down from the server. More details here: Pulling Records Down to Go.
Finally, remember that you don't want to rename the mobile file when you prep a new version. The downloading mechanism described below is all about replacing a file of the same name, so leave your file names alone when you perp new files. (Now you may want to backup your mobile files and append a timestamp to the file name for your backups, but the file you prep and upload should always have the same name.)
Downloading a new version.
On the iOS device, it is really easy to download a new version of the mobile file you're using. Though the interface for this is a little different depending on which mobile example file you have, here is how it works in our Mobile.fp7 example.
