FileMaker Data API

The FileMaker Data API uses a relatively simple authentication pattern when using a self hosted server. Post valid credentials to the server, receive a token, use that as a bearer token for subsequent requests. With FileMaker Cloud 2 however, the process is made somewhat more complex through the use of Cognito, the AWS credentials management […]

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We do lots of work with FileMaker, particularly with the FileMaker Data API. We also use Ansible for lots of the deployments we do of web applications we build. Recently we needed to put both of these things together because we needed to pull information from FileMaker and make decisions in Ansible about what needed […]

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Director Steve Winter presented his session title ‘Explore cURL for FileMaker’ at the Scandanavia FileMaker Developer Conference in Helsingør, Denmark. Summary Accessing data through REST is the current best-practice for data sharing. That’s not always been easy with FileMaker. Until now! In version 16 FileMaker introduced the FileMaker REST API which allows far easier integration […]

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Uploading files Dropzone is already enabled for the file upload, it just needs something to do with the files which it receives. The Postman example File upload gives us a good starting point because it shows us the name the file needs to be given when it’s uploaded, but it masks one very important aspect […]

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Populate ‘latest clients’ table We want to populate the table at the base of the page with the five most recently added contacts from the database. This means setting the _limit and _sort query parameters appropriately. If you look closely at the Postman Get multiple records, limit, offset, sort example you’ll see that this pretty […]

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Logging users in Now that we’ve got the unauthenticated components of the site done we need to work on getting users logged in. To do that we need to make some changes: Create a logUserIn() method which will accept user input and call your fetchToken() method. You may need to adjust that depending on how […]

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Connecting from the backend Our backend application, in the Backend resources folder, is a Symfony 4 web app. You can find out more about Symfony from the project website, but in short it’s a modern PHP development framework, on which several of the leading PHP projects, like Laravel, Drupal and Concrete (to name a few) are […]

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Connecting from the frontend JavaScript running in a browser is able to perform an XMLHttpRequest from the browser to a web server. The simplest way to implement that is using an AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) request. You could connect directly to the XMLHttpRequest API yourself, but that makes things way more complicated than they […]

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In this activity we’re going to work in FileMaker to replicate the queries made in the previous exercise with Postman. This provides an opportunity to interact with the FileMaker Data API in a programming environment I hope you’re familiar with. It may also provide an opportunity to learn about interacting with external APIs in FileMaker […]

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Now that we’ve got our interface file in place it’s time to start interacting with it using the FileMaker Data API. Initially we’re going to use Postman, an API development and testing tool to try out the various options that are available to us. If you don’t have Postman installed, grab it form their downloads […]

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