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.

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