Re: Mac and IBM i + ODBC (was: Fonts in ACS)

Hello,

We are using the Actualtech ODBC driver with Monterey with Filemaker.  It is not listed on their website but they do have it.  We have had it for a while so maybe they don't sell it any longer.  I don't know.  But it still works for us.

We can't use the ACS ODBC driver because it uses unixODBC and Filemaker on the Mac works with iODBC.

Regards,

Bobby

On 5/13/2022 03:44, Patrik Schindler wrote:

Hello Jack,

Am 11.05.2022 um 18:33 schrieb Jack Woehr via MIDRANGE-L <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

Mac is a pretty decent platform for interaction with IBM i.

Indeed!

Another hobbyist friend lately asked me if it might be possible to tie FileMaker via ODBC to the IBM i (and older machinery and OS releases). FileMaker saw extensive use in the 1990's and later, but was pushed back to a niche solution when everything was expected to run in a browser window.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FileMaker

ODBC is largely absent in modern macOS releases. There is an applications which can be installed to get a data source point'n click interface, but in the end, I ran out of time before I to got it to run. My friend needed to move on. The main problem was that FileMaker gave errors about not finding the shlibs.

I guess UnixODBC might be a free and good solution. It works well on Linux with the latest IBM i ODBC libraries installed in /opt/ibm/iSeriesAccess/lib64/.

There is a also a vendor, Actualtech, who once had a "connector" for the Mac to IBM i. Asking them, they state that connections to IBM i do no longer work because of changes Apple introduced with MacOS Catalina (10.15).

Has anyone successfully used FileMaker as a graphical front end to IBM i databases on recent macOS releases? Probably on M1 based Macs?

:wq! PoC