Synchronising Filemaker executable with MySql

[goanna300]

I have built a MySQL booking system to be used online by about 20 users all over Australia.

Users can go online and see a calendar of their bookings.

The problem with these systems is always this: Users take some bookings online from the public - but others over the phone. So they keep two sets of books. There are double-bookings, etc.

I've considered using AJAX to send users an Ical format calendar to synchronise with outlook. But I'd much rather send all the users their own desktop filemaker executables which would synchronise/dump MySql Data.

That way I can get some compliance from the users who may use Macs or who will not pay for a full Filemaker licence for their desktop.

Anybody tried anything like this?

Steve

[Mikhail Edoshin]

FileMaker runtime can issue a http request to some data source and import resulting XML. If you can have your MySQL database to serve data in XML, you can use FileMaker runtimes to import MySQL data, but I'm not sure about synchronizing. You can probably make different requests to pass the required commands (i.e. add, edit, delete), but then you'll have to somehow transform the request into an actual command to MySQL and this may be too difficult.

If you were using FileMaker Server to serve web data instead of MySQL, you could have the runtimes to connect to the server's XML/XSL front end. This would be the simplest solution, because it would allow you to both import data in native FileMaker FMPXMLRESULT format and to directly add, edit or delete existing records on the server via http requests. Not too simple, but doable.