ISO FileMaker Magazine

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.

While FileMaker’s script step Insert from URL does allow for basic communication with web services, it is, by no means, comprehensive enough to provide all the features necessary. What’s really needed is the full cURL library.

This open source tool has been available for over 15 years and is baked into a ton of software packages, including FileMaker itself. However, it’s really only exposed within plug-ins such as Base Elements and the MBS plug-in.

So, in order to fully understand what going on, it’s best to start with the source. And, that’s understanding cURL itself and how options are managed and how you set and parse HTTP headers.

This video walks through the process of using cURL within the context of a plug-in. Once you understand how to set and control settings through the plug-in, you’re off to the races and working with any web service you can think of.

When you know just a little part of how FileMaker works under the hood, you can come up with creative solutions to everyday problems. Take web services as an example. They use defined structures such as XML and JSON. And, when you consider that you’re using this third party defined structure and the need to mix in your own data, you want to find the easy way to solve the problem.

In my case, I really like the path of least resistance. Of course, there are many ways to solve a problem. Let’s consider a FileMaker script. It can be self contained and have no dependencies on any other FileMaker elements. It can be called by another script and can be completely disassociated from any and all context. Context, within FileMaker, if you didn’t know, is the situation where a script can only do something if it’s executing in the right place. The right place would be the current Layout in which the script is running.

If we don’t fight context, however, and simply make our scripts only operate within the proper context, then we can simply handle the error when the right context doesn’t exist and let the proper people know about it.

I’ve coded solutions in both ways. Context independent and context sensitive, and it really boils down to use, preference and perspective. So, for this video we’re taking the context approach and using FileMaker’s ever so easy ability to merge in field data or global variables into text objects in order to make things easy for us to copy our Custom Functions to the clipboard. This information in this video and file have “Oh so many implications.”

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!