How difficult is it to get my FMP DB on the Web

July 3, 200223 yr

I am not a proffesional FMP developer but have fooled around with FMP since version 3. I have never had the need to put any DB's on the web until now and am wondering how difficult of a process it is. The reason I am thinking of doing this is that I want to be able to access my DB when I am on the road and would also like my salespeople to have access from thier location as well. Can anyone give me general advice on the process of getting my DB on the web? Steps I need to take? Things to look out for? How to get started? Anything?

Thanks,

Joe

July 4, 200223 yr

Re: How difficult is it to get my FMP DB on the Web

Depends on:

Where you are starting from.

What exactly you want to do.

Whether you use custom or instant web publishing

If you know HTML and a bit about how the internet works

Buying some books is a really good place to start.... do a search on Amazon there are a few available now. Good books will also act as a good reference for CDML (the markup used to interact with the FMPro web companion). FM website has a lot of stuff in their knowledge base as well. When you have more specific issues or problems forums like this one work well as a place to search answers and post questions.

good luck

July 4, 200223 yr

Newbies

I am also pretty new to FileMaker on the web - see my question "IWP (Instant Web Publishing) or CWP (Custom Web Publishing)?" I found it fairly easy to covert a FileMaker layout using IWP so that you can "use it" via a web browser and tested this locally on my machine - the information provided by FileMaker is fairly easy to follow and this is a nice little piece of work to do. However, I am now stuck as I don't know whether IWP will do what I utimately want it to do (allow several hundred individual access either their own records or a group of records using). If it doesn't, then I think the route is CWP (CDML or HTML) which I would guess is a whole different ball game...

July 7, 200223 yr

RE: CWP (CDML or HTML) which I would guess is a whole different ball game...

This is true but it needn't be too painful. You can buy visual HTML editors (Dreamweaver and Golive are very popular) that save you having to code all the HTML yourself. You will have to enter the CDML yourself in HTML "view" as the tags use extended characters. For example "&" this would changed to & to be viewed in a browser and will not be intepreted by WC correctly.

The extra power you will get with CWP will be worth the effort.