FileMaker 2025 released and MBS Plugin

July 9, 2025Jul 9

Claris released today FileMaker 2025 in version 22.0.1. Works fine with MBS FileMaker Plugin 15.2.

You get a few cool new things. Let me point to a few highlights:

Artificial Intelligence
The new version embraces AI with providing a model server within FileMaker Server. You can install various models using the Miniforge project. Then you can have the server use embeddings to perform semantic search in server scripts.
Linux support
FileMaker Server supports Ubuntu 24 for Linux in addition to version 22. Please consider moving your FileMaker Server to Linux, if you haven't yet.
Upgraded SQL engine
The SQL engine got upgraded with new commands like the INTERVAL function for date and timestamp calculations. The ALTER TABLE command can rename tables and fields (columns). Query the FileMaker_ValueLists table to learn about value lists and query their values.
Plugins in tools
You can use plugins in the command line tools and they are installed in the bin folder with the server. Use the -plugin_folder parameter to point to the folder with the plugin files. You can use MBS Plugin 15.3 or later there.
This allows you to use the plugin functions in various calculations like auto-enter. see also Use MBS Plugin in FileMaker Upgrade Tool
Faster JSON
All scripts using JSON functions get faster automatically due to caching of JSON data structures in variables (and per thread). To you can use JSONParse to explicitly request parsing to happen in a certain script step. e.g.
Set Variable [ $json; Value: JSONParse($json) ]

But please read details in the release notes:

You can download it on the ESD website. The link is in the license email from Claris.

For MBS FileMaker Plugin, just make sure you have the 15.2 version or the upcoming 15.3 with the latest fixes. We had to adjust our plugin in several places to fix a few bugs. And of course we keep an eye open on what users report and may adjust more for the next plugin release in the next week.

Since FileMaker 2025 offers collapsing script steps and added comments for tables, we disabled the matching features in MBS Plugin. The implementation from Claris works better and supports Windows.

If you like to learn more, please check the FMTraining.tv live streams this week featuring Claris staff explaining the details.