There are many cases where FileMaker's scripting isn't always the best tool for the job and where a language like Ruby can bring a lot of power to your FileMaker development. The following is a description of a simple technique for using ruby scripts from within a FileMaker solution without the use of a plugin. I've found this technique useful for employing regular expressions for complex text parsing, making web requests to work with web APIs, and for parsing and generating XML and other serialized data structures. Ruby has a wealth of great libraries for doing anything you can imagine and is just plain fun to write.

The Problem Most FileMaker Server setups on OSX that I have seen are using the default permissions as set by the FilerMaker Server (FMS) installer. When viewed in the Terminal, they look like this: drwxrwxr-x  11 fmserver  fmsadmin   374 Jul 16 12:54 Databases

[Authored by Ian] Doing a Google search for “FileMaker web” brings up a bevy of methods, technologies, and acronyms that all seem to have something to do with making FileMaker available to Web users. What follows is a digest of many of these technologies, based on Beezwax’s extensive experience with them. While all of them […]

[Authored by Ian] This was the first of several articles around 2009 on designing and implementing FM/Web integrations. Some methods are outdated, but we’ve kept them on our blog because we like some of the general approaches described. One of the basic questions when considering a FM/Web hybrid solution is how FM and the Web […]

[Authored by Alex_g] [01/04/15 – Editor’s note: Beezwax no longer maintains FMCakeMix, but the open source project became maintained by Atsushi Matsuo. You may find more information, and his contact info on the FMCakeMix GitHub project.]

Today we are making bBox, our toolbox of external functions for FileMaker, freely available to all FileMaker developers. Use it to extend the reach of your FileMaker solutions to resources outside of FileMaker by launching and communicating with other programs, utilizing the powerful commands built-in to Mac OS X, and easily creating, processing, and managing […]

[Authored by Ian] I’ve been doing work on a couple projects integrating Rails with FileMaker Pro (FMP) over HTTP. There are a few different FMP features and plugins the FMP developers use to connect to Rails, none of which I truly grok. Notwithstanding my lack of FMP knowledge, I wanted to write-up what I expect […]

Passing values between FileMaker and AppleScript can be a pain. Sure, you can use a named field and table in FileMaker to do this, but if you (or someone else) ever changes either of the names your AppleScript routine breaks. So, even though its not the most efficient way to do things, for short routines […]

ValueCount ( FilterValues ( lst ; value ) ) Ben Miller and I came up with this tiny little function to tell us how many times a specific value occurs in a list.

If you’re working with data from outside of FileMaker, you’ll commonly have to work with dates that FileMaker’s GetAsDate function won’t understand. To handle this, I created a custom function that allows conversion of a wide variety of date formats. Some examples of how the function works:

[Authored by Ian] I’ve probably written a hundred render_not_found methods in my life as a Rails dev. Usually they just render a static file under /public, and maybe, if I’m feeling nice, give an XML response. No more!