On the Ottomatic hosting platform, we don’t have SSH access, which means there are two ways to upload a file to a FileMaker server:
Upload it directly from your local computer.
Use OttoDeploy to copy the file from one server to another.
Problem to solve
Sometimes, the file might not be available on another server, or OttoDeploy might fail. For instance, I recently had to transfer an 8GB file from one server to another. I downloaded the file locally on my computer, but I couldn’t upload it to the other server after several attempts. Additionally, my bandwidth is extremely limited, which made the process even more challenging.
Another scenario involves storing a FileMaker file on a cloud drive. In such cases, we would need to download the file to our local computer and then upload it to FileMaker Server.
Recommended solution
In the ‘Live Databases’ folder, we can upload a FileMaker file to FileMaker Server without any issues. However, this method requires that the file be available locally. It would be fantastic if we could upload a file directly from a URL.
For transferring the files quickly, the Ottomatic Cloud console has a “quick transfer” option in the Databases list on the server dashboard. If you go to a file (or a set of files you multi-select), you can choose the option in the three-dot menu or the bulk actions menu to “Send to Another Server”. It will do a simple deployment of those files that will send them across without you having to open up OttoDeploy.
As for the actual request of being able to tell your server to download a file from a URL, I’ll add it to our list. If you just want to do it with FIleMaker files, I could see an option for a deployment that you could give it a URL (or a list of URLs), and it will download and deploy the files at those URLs. This could be exposed in the UI as what you describe, but it would add the ease of file opening and deployment that deployments give you. Does that sound like what you’re looking for?