Please forgive a newbie question. I am working with an organisation that has a large MySQL database with web front ends in several offices. The Web front end is, frankly, awful. Inflexible, irritating, and just plain bad. What's more, we can't get at the code to change it.

We would like to use FM pro as the front end because it is so easy to build, change, and generally add new reports, queries, etc.

My question is: is it possible? What are the limitations? Can I use FM pro as a front end to a MySQL database and if so, how?

Although the ESS feature of FileMaker was not designed to be a full front end to an external source, it can be useful for many things.

You can use it to perform finds, update records, etc.

You will find though that there are limitations and you have to plan carefully for speed that is usable to your end users. Using views and indexing fields for your MySQL tables will help you.

Also things that are easy such in the SQL world such as outer joins and unions are not available in FileMaker, so you would want to create these on the external side using views of a stored procedure.