Web publishing HELP PLEASE

[jeemart]

Hello Forum

I am just a novice but have completed my database and need to be able to load this on-line so that my other office will be able to add and delete data from my newly created database.

Can someone give me a few pointers as I am new to this and would greatly appreciate someone trying to help me.

I have looked at the help file and tried a few times but keep getting lost.

Thanks in advance.

Martin

[John May - Point In Space]

You can publish your Filemaker databases with a number of options:

1 - Instant Web Publishing: This is built into Filemaker, and allows you to publish directly from the database without creating any HTML pages for it. Note that it is particularly limited. See the Filemaker documentation for more info.

2 - Custom Web Publishing: Also built into Filemaker. With this, you embed XML/XSLT tags (or CDML with FileMaker 6 and earlier) into your HTML pages to perform your Filemaker actions. This method allows complete control of appearance, since you can customize the HTML output. Also see the Filemaker documentation for this.

3 - Lasso: A separate language by OmniPilot that talks to Filemaker. Like Custom Web Publishing but MUCH more flexible - it's a complete programming language. See for more info on Lasso - I suggest downloading the 30 day trial of Lasso Studio if you're interested in getting involved with this.

4 - FX.php: This is a library that lets you make database queries to FileMaker from PHP, a very popular open-source web language. For more information, see .

- John

[Reed]

If there are only a few other remote users, you can also consider some other non-web remote access options:

1. Just have them install FMP on the remote computer and connect to the hosted file. This is easy, but potentially slow for certain actions carried out on large record sets.

2. Use a remote desktop connection to a client machine accessing the shared file on a LAN. (Timbuktu or equivalent) This works well for a few users and is fairly fast and inexpensive.

3. Use terminal services or Citrix to share a filemaker desktop connection with many simultaneous remote users. Fast, but can be expensive and tricky to implement.

That said, we use a mix of instant web publishing and lasso for remote access in our department.... If you just want simple add and delete record access for remote users, IWP will probably be sufficient

[Wim Decorte]

Hi John,

You're forgetting a very big #5 (for those on Windows) ASP and ASP.NET. FMSA spits out XML and it's very easy to consume that XML in ASP and ASP.NET. Just as easy as in PHP.

[Reed]

Wondering about flash... how easy is it to use XML or ODBC to connect FMSA to a flash application?

[Wim Decorte]

Good point, Reed. Forgot about Flash. Don't know flash but I assume it's relatively easy to work with XML data because there are a couple of very slick deployments out there that hook into FMSA.

It comes down to this: if you have any "coding environment" that can easily work with XML data then you can do web publishing (and create desktop apps for that matter) using that environment.

[Nemo]

id also be interested in this, the solution im currently working on is being designed side by side with the web interface, and we had looked at using flash has anyone done this and if so do you have any pointers or things to look out for?