ISO FileMaker Magazine

While younger generations of Internet users are increasingly adopting communication tools like Discord, it's challenging to envision a future devoid of at least one distinctive means of communication - email. Could a world without email imply that government agencies, utility providers, and other entities transmit messages based on your DNA sequence, linked to your registered devices? The possibilities are intriguing.

But for the present moment, email remains a crucial part of our digital landscape. The transition toward a paperless society is still underway and is likely to persist for many decades to come.

So, the key question is, have you seamlessly integrated HTML emails into your FileMaker solutions? If not, rest assured that you'll acquire a comprehensive understanding of both implementation and troubleshooting when it comes to facilitating communication between FileMaker and an SMTP server. This video offers a practical script and in-depth insights into successfully sending multipart mixed emails. Whether your HTML email simply involves basic formatting, like bolding certain text, or incorporates intricate features like a logo-adorned letterhead, sending the email via SMTP is your destination. Let's make that journey a smooth one and ensure you're well-equipped with all the requisite knowledge.

Do you need to work with online APIs and find yourself wishing there was an easy way to accomplish it? Well, there actually is. In fact, in much of technology, there's something or someone somewhere which has likely already solved the problem.

In the case of using REST (Representational state transfer) to interact with service APIs within FileMaker, it's nice to have a single tool which will handle most of the heavy work for you. When native JSON was added to FileMaker, the last piece to the puzzle was a more expanded method of interacting with the network. The cURL library was already being used by FileMaker and it was simply a matter of "opening things up" so developers could use the full suite of the cURL library.

By adding the cURL options calculation to the Insert From URL script step the world of the web opened up for our humble FileMaker Pro.

This video provides a comprehensive understanding of how curl is integrated into FileMaker and how you can use a freely provided script to manage all your REST based interactions. Knowing about HTTP status codes and request/response headers is what you'll find covered in this video and the associated file.

Having made the connection to Google's Services using Oauth 2, and spending a touch of time investigating how we can discover documents within Google Drive, we're in the home stretch of reading and writing data to a Google Sheet.

By simplifying the way we make API calls to any of Google's services, we end up with a great solution for working with any of Google's available APIs. Also, by focusing on the simple example of working with one simple Google Sheet, we end up capturing data via a Google Form which dumps data into the Google Sheet. All we need to do is read and write to that sheet.

This video covers the topic of watching for an expired access token and making sure that each call to the API has the greatest chance of success. Within no time you'll be reading and writing to a Google Sheet as if everything was right there within FileMaker Pro itself!

This video is a continuation of the first video in this series where we took a look at connecting to Google's myriad of available services. Once you know how to make the secure connection which Google requires, you can access all the possible services.

The trick with working with web services, such as Google or AWS, is that you need to become familiar with how FileMaker requests data and then process the response. We tackle that task within this video then move on to working with Google Drive in order to determine which file it is we want to work with.

After making a successful connection we also need to know how to maintain or re-establish that connection. Google doesn't keep the door open forever you know. So, settle in for another longer, but valuable exploration of connecting to Google's services.

Integrating third party APIs can be a bit daunting when you’ve never worked with them before. Fortunately, the most difficult part of the process is simply taking the time to research the API and implement the features you’d like to have.

When you’re working within FileMaker, you’re often capturing content which may need to be pushed into another online location - such as Dropbox. If your FileMaker solution needs this, then adding FileMaker Dropbox integration is the way to go.

With FileMaker 16, you can now use the native cURL functionality in order to directly upload a file into a designated Dropbox account. Once you’ve made the connection with Dropbox, you can pretty much do anything you’d like to your dropbox account.