ISO FileMaker Magazine

Learning JavaScript, while also learning FileMaker development, can seem like a daunting task. The trick is to take things little-by-little and pick up those essential skills which allow you to add in the really cool functionality.

You don't have to code your own JavaScript library. You just need to be willing to integrate them with that little bit of know-how you acquired. The great thing about this process is building the skills to be able to implement things in a quick fashion. In this video, I show you how to "hijack" a web page within the FileMaker Web Viewer object. We do this by injecting jQuery and then using another JavaScript library to convert the HTML we capture into a popular plain text format called Markdown.

By doing this, we essentially create a tool which allows us to easily and quickly pull content from the web. The bigger benefit, however, is knowing how to integrate JavaScript libraries onto the Web Viewer and being able to use our own JavaScript code to make a web page or integrated feature do the things we want it to do.

Some of my most favorite moments, when working with technology, are when you see the result of a few lines of code do what used to take hours and hours of work. Seeing the fruits of knowledge labor which replaces a lot of manual labor. It's glorious!

The example I'm mentally referencing is any time you need to extract some content from a web page and it's literally SITTING RIGHT THERE in front of your face and you end up using your precious time doing the good old copy and paste.

Every day there are SO many mistakes made by human error because of duplicate entry that if the data is in digital format you're almost always better off just pulling out what already exists.

So, how can this be done easily within FileMaker? Well, it may be the situation where the web page is ALREADY including the code you need to simply extract what you're wanting to get. The trick is understanding how you can use that code and moving beyond that point if it isn't already there.

In this video, I walk you through all the details and all the understanding necessary to web scrap most any web page and do it with the native tools provided by FileMaker 19 and higher. While it is possible with versions prior to FileMaker 19, the new FileMaker.PerformScript function makes things so much easier.

Lately, here at ISO FileMaker Magazine we’ve been covering a lot about web services and using technologies like REST, cURL and JSON.

Well, that’s not about change with this video. We’re now needing to move forward with our Custom Functions database and make a connection to the web site where the custom functions are hosted.

We do this with a dedicated Custom Function which takes advantage of the Base Elements plugin to make HTTP requests. With the knowledge learned in our cURL video about request & response headers, we can connect to the BrianDunning.com web site and get the id values of any new custom functions.

Making this type of request means we are relying on code which can break at some point in the future, should the web site itself change. So, I talk about how to deal with this and how to parse the data in the most efficient manner.

Let’s scrape some web data and get it into our database!

FileMaker can be such a wonderful desktop tool for harvesting and managing a lot of data. It’s because the user interface is baked right there into the backend database. You can whip up a powerful data parsing solution in no time. Can it handle the data? Yep! Can you build the interface right there? Yep! This sense of “data power” can be compounded even more with a little bit of know-how.

When you’re not afraid to step, just a bit, outside of FileMaker’s user interface and simply plug-in to another technology or programming language, you’ll find BIG benefits when seeking the holy grail of code leverage.

In this video, I walk you through some serious insight into how the big boys and girls like to parse their web data. If there’s ever a source of content you simply can’t access in an importable format, then you have to know how to web scrape like a pro within FileMaker - Pro, that is.