ISO FileMaker Magazine

In the process of creating a simple media archiving database I found I had used the same skill twice because of how FileMaker returns data from certain functions. Hence, I decided to provide you with my simple little start to a Media Archiving solution.

Simply, it asks for a folder, then pulls the paths to all files from the selected, and enclosed, folders into the database. It's really a pretty simple thing because it's managed with one simple function from the BaseElements plug-in.

However, not all simple things are that simple. There are many things you need to account for when importing something from an external file and how you go about addressing things like prompting a user for a required plug-in. Regardless of whether you're needing a media archiving solution or not, there's always something more you can learn about working with FileMaker in order to accomplish your desired goals.

With FileMaker’s PatternCount(), Left(), Right() and Middle() functions you can certainly extract a lot of data. The functions, however, are severely limited when it comes to matching variable patterns of data.

That’s where, in the world of programming, Regular Expressions, or RegEx for short, is SUPER handy! It’s used in pretty much EVERY computing language and I don’t personally know a professional developer who can develop without it. It’s been available since the 1950’s and it’s a worthwhile tool to know for sure.

Recently, I personally reduced a complex FileMaker file from three tables and close to twenty dedicated scripts, all for parsing some data, down to one table and two scripts. Trust me, it was a crazy process where a full document of text was imported, line by line, into a FileMaker table, just so a loop could be used to walk across the data multiple times. Talk about extra network traffic just to process some data!

It was MUCH easier to simply use a RegEx pattern and directly extract the data desired and be done with it. Of course, the developer who preceded me obviously didn’t know RegEx and it’s why I’m providing this video for you. Learn it, use it and get the job done quicker when it’s the right tool for the job.

REST (Representational state transfer) has quickly become the de facto standard for communication between services and apps. Before it, came SOAP and XMLRPC, but the two buzzwords you’ll hear over and over these days are REST and JSON.

When it comes to FileMaker, you’ve always been able to do super basic REST with the Insert from URL script step. Later down the road, FileMaker added in support for the POST method of service interaction with the httpspost:// url scheme.

While the basics are always nice to have, you can’t do much beyond access public services with what FileMaker provides natively. If you’re ever going to work with a truly powerful API such as those offered by YouTube, FaceBook, Twitter, Google Apps and Vimeo, then you have to use something a bit more powerful.

Fortunately, for FileMaker developers, we have a number of possibilities. One of those options is the freely available BaseElements plugin. The plugin can access pretty much access any web service and will allow you to perform the full suite of possible interactions. It uses the very popular cURL library behind the scenes and with a little bit of knowledge, you’ll be interacting with web services in no time.

If you have the need for integrating true REST client functionality within a FileMaker solution, then you’ll be glad you watched this video!