Fileload( function fails because I don't have permission to view the file

I have databases alpha and beta in the same folder. In alpha, I have a procedure which contains this command:

let BetaData = fileload("beta.pandb")

The result is:

57%20pm

Why? I get the same result whether the target file is open or not.

It works fine with .txt or .rtf files as the target but not with .pandb files.

That’s not really the right error message, but the result of this function should be an error – the .pandb file itself has no data to load. Panorama X files (.pandb files) are bundles, in other words, not a single file, but a collection of files in a folder that is masquerading as a file. In the Finder, you can right click on a .pandb file and choose Show Contents to see what is inside – you’ll find about a half dozen files.

So, you can’t use fileload( on a .pandb file, just as you can’t use it on a folder – because a .pandb file actually IS a folder. You can use fileload( on the individual files inside a .pandb file, like this:

let BetaData = fileload("beta.pandb/data.archive")

My next question would be – what were you planning to do with your BetaData variable? It would just be a bunch of binary nonsense, you can’t look inside and examine the data or anything else. So there really is no point to loading any of the contents of a .pandb file into a variable.

I had written code to import several text files and, without thinking, just wrote the same code to import a Panorama X file. My brain then reconnected and I used the importdatabase statement. I was misled, in part, by the statement in the documentation that the fileload( function “reads the entire contents of any file on disk”.