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!

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