Installing MBS Plugin on macOS into FileMaker Pro

12 hours ago12 hr

Let's say you like to install the MBS FileMaker Plugin on your Mac for FileMaker Pro.

Download

First you download our MBSPlugin.dmg from our website.

For macOS please use the dmg file. This one is notarized, so Apple had a chance to run their malware scanner on it. While you could also load the zip archive with the same content, you would then get warnings about the plugin being unnotarized. The download may take a while.

You open the disk image and there you find a folder with the macOS plugin and inside the MBS.fmplugin file.

Extensions folder

The plugin is installed into the extension folder. Please go to Settings in FileMaker Pro to open the settings dialog. Then you see this dialog:

Inside the dialog, please go to the Plug-ins tab. There you see no plugin in the list yet. But there is a button to reveal the plug-ins folder.

e.g. /Users/yourname/Library/Application Support/FileMaker/FileMaker Pro/22.0/Extensions

Please copy the MBS.fmplugin file into this extensions folder. Then this version of FileMaker Pro can use the plugin.

If you have multiple versions of FileMaker Pro, you can use a different extensions folder two levels higher up:

e.g. /Users/yourname/Library/Application Support/FileMaker/Extensions\

Only install the plugin either in the per-version or the global folder for all versions. Please avoid having the plugin twice by putting it in both folders.

As you see you can also add there the libraries for Saxon, DynaPDF, LibXL or various SQL database connectors for MySQL, PostgreSQL or FreeTDS.

Plugin loaded

Now start FileMaker Pro again. Go to the settings dialog into the plug-ins tab and check whether FileMaker loaded the plugin.

If it doesn't load the plugin, please check the troubleshooting list: Why MBS Plugin fails to load.

Below the list, you see the plugin information with the version information.

Click the configuration button to open the preferences dialog:

Automation

The steps above are good if you have a few machines. But if you need to install the plugin on more, you may check out the script step to install a plugin: