RR and FileMaker

[Gary Rathbone]

> The recent discussion on interfacing FileMaker and Rev has aroused my 
> curiosity.
> 
> I have occasion, especially at election time, to work with FileMaker. 
> Since I  have never been able to decipher the arcane scripting 
> language in FileMaker... 

I really like FileMaker. Although its not as powerful or as cheap as other
products on the market you really can produce great results very quickly.
Filemaker seemed to get a foothold with my customers many years ago (early
1990's) as a cross platform solution. I still have many existing users with
FileMaker databases.

I do agree that the scripting is limited and very contrived. But, as it
comes 'web ready' then its ideal to use Rev either as a front end or as I'm
doing a query tool. Currently I'm using Filemaker for a 'Fault Call Logging
System'. Rev will sit on the same (or a separate server) and query the
'call-log' database. The data is then analysed, turned into web pages and
uploaded onto my co-located server for users to track the progress of their
call and see the stats on response times etc...

The calls made to Filemaker seen in previous posts are HTTP (web) requests
using CDML (Claris Dynamic Markup Language) and are returned in a predefined
text or HTML template. A great resource for CDML is :
http://www.webmastermac.com/tips/filemaker/
Especially the Filemaker CDML resources at :
http://www.spinnerworld.com/cdmltags.html


>...my alternative has been to export the 
> FileMaker file as a text file, make my changes using Transcript in RR 
> and then import the altered text file back into FileMaker.
> 
> Can I assume that this is not a really dumb way to work with 
> FileMaker?

As ever, there are other ways. Often when I look at how I can 'streamline'
tasks like this then I take a look at how long the task takes me over a
given period, say a year. I then take a guess at how long it would take me
to write an app to do it 'automatically', if its significantly longer then
generally I don't bother. Unless of course I've got some spare time and can
see how learning such a system would be benefical for other projects.

Hope this helps.

Regards

Gary Rathbone