FileMaker 2026 and MBS Plugin

16 hours ago16 hr

Claris released version 26 of the FileMaker product family. As you may have noticed, the version number is finally synchronized to the current year. There are a lot of new features in this release:

This release brings a lot of new AI integration. You can install a standalone Claris AI Server to handle the workload of AI queries. It is highly recommended to buy a separate machine with lots of RAM and a good GPU to speed up the queries. Mac Studios with M5 Max/Ultra may come handy soon.
Related to this are new comments for fields to help the AI know what a field is about. In FileMaker Pro you can use the Insert Image Caption script step to use an image model on the AI server to get image captions.
Claris offers a built-in backup feature. Great to keep the hassle low and it allows the Claris Partner to sell it to their clients. The data is uploaded to cloud storage, preferable in a different region. Of course you must still run your own scripts to upload the nightly backups and all the hourly increments to your own backup server.
Related to the backup is the standby server. A feature we had in FileMaker 14, but now with a different implementation. It is built on top of the incremental backups Changes are regularly transferred in batches to the standby server via SSH. Your clients can opt-in to this, get a second server and have it wait for a switch over in case of a disaster. But please have the standby server in a different location and on a different Internet provider.
The installer for FileMaker Server can install just the tools. Great if you like to have the tools on your machine. Once you have the FMUpgradeTool, you may notice that it has a new trick: it can create a new database from an XML representation. Related to this are upgrades to the Save as XML script step and enhancements in the options so you can choose what to export.
The OData interface got upgrades to better handle metadata. Since OData is the preferred way for AI to talk to FileMaker Server, this helps a lot with various integrations. Please note that Claris like to see you move to OData in favor of ODBC and Data API on the long term.
There is an updated inspector for layouts. The layout is in context related and only shows features available for the currently selected items. This makes relevant options easier to find and cleans up the old interface. But since not everyone likes changes, you may be able to turn it off in the preferences soon. And this is macOS only as the Windows side is still in development.

Please read details in the release notes:

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

In FileMaker 26 you can finally specify the position for a custom dialog. Before we had to use our Window.PositionNextDialog function. That one still works and can handle all kind of dialogs like various FileMaker dialogs.

The SQL engine got an interesting upgrade. You can how create relationship with a SQL command. When you add a field, you can use e.g. AssetID int FOREIGN KEY REFERENCES Assets(AssetID) to link the AssetID field in that table to the AssetID field in the Assets table. The field names do not need to match and you can of course have text nodes. We can use the same with ALTER TABLE when adding a field to a table. See our FM.ExecuteFileSQLOnIdle function and the examples there.

The GetTextFromPDF function in FileMaker can now better handle PDF images with images. Great to see what is on a page. This may need to render the PDF page and then get it through OCR on macOS. We do that with Vision.RecognizeText function in our plugin and there you can specify options like the language, how many pages to cover or provide custom words for the dictionary to help with spelling. And it works on macOS, iOS and Windows.

The Export Field Contents script step now works server-side. But it is still limited to temporary and documents folder. You may still use Container.WriteFile or similar plugin functions to write on different locations. For example you could have a data folder outside the FileMaker folder. Or you write to the html documents folder for the local web server to share files easily. Or you even write files to network attached storage.

The server has support for Webhooks. Great to catch callbacks from various services. We usually uses a PHP script to accept the hook, check the values and then use Data API to talk to the FileMaker Server and finally run a script. You can do this now a bit more direct, but still we may prefer the PHP script to filter out some requests in order to not overload the server. Check our WebHook functions if you need a WebHook in FileMaker Pro (e.g. for OAuth) or you like to turn one on for a short time in a server script and catch a callback.

In the scripts you have new PDF script steps. Instead of doing an export of records to PDF in one script step, you can split this into five steps. For example you can start a PDF, export records from one layout, then switch to another layout and export some more records into the same PDF file. If you need more options to merge PDFs, please check our DynaPDF functions. Also helpful to edit, split, encrypt, sign or render PDF files.

Finally Claris updated libraries. Tomcat, NodeJS, CURL, Vaadin, PDF-Writer, OmniORB, OpenSSL and others got upgraded. That's always great to fix various security holes. Although be aware that on Linux updating the system may cause FileMaker Server use newer system provided libraries. The ones included within the FileMaker products are always a bit behind the latest releases. CURL is currently at 8.20 and the older 8.18 is used by Claris. That is due to them needed to integrate a newer version and then doing the Q&A for a few weeks to make sure there is no bug introduced with a newer library. Also wait to see if the release is quickly followed with a .2 bug fix. We do similar, but with a shorter cycle.

For MBS FileMaker Plugin licensing on the server side, we count how many servers you have. Usually we start with a one server license. This covers the one machine with 3 copies of the plugin running in the script engine, Web Direct and Data API processes. This includes running multiple server scripting processes if you turn this on. If you add worker server for Web Direct and install the plugin there, that counts as separate servers. But the standby servers don't count since we expect you only use one of the two servers. When you switch over, the license server would detect that you stopped on the one machine and continued on the other machine. The license automatically transfers. And it automatically transfers back if you switch back. No worries.

Please try FileMaker 26. We recommend you use it with MBS FileMaker Plugin 16.2 or newer. We had FileMaker 26 in testing for the last months and fixed a couple of issues. Version 15.x may load and work for most parts. But you can avoid trouble by using a newer version like 16.1 or 16.2.