I'm in the early stages of building an app for iOS that would serve multiple purposes.

 

A few of the options will send emails to a specific account that would be monitored for call-backs.

 

We'd like few of the other options would be to place orders in our current Filemaker system, but I don't see a way to do that without FM:GO, and as nice as it looks, a dedicated database app is not really the solution we're looking for right now.

 

Is there any way at all to make table updates or query FMP databases with native code similar to how I'd work with PHP+MySQL or C#+MSSQL, or am I out of luck?

You could serve your FileMaker data as a web service with Custom Web Publishing.

You could serve your FileMaker data as a web service with Custom Web Publishing.

I'm very new to Xcode/Obj.C, would you be able to point me in the right direction for what you're suggesting? (not looking for the exact answer, mind you, I'm not new to programming, just to the Apple way of doing so.)

For Xcode and Objective-C programming, you're on the wrong forum. For FileMaker's custom web publishing side (which has nothing to do with Apple), you'll want to learn FileMaker's PHP API.

 

Could you give us any more details why FileMaker Go isn't suitable for your needs? If we can pursuade you otherwise, developing a FileMaker Go app for submitting orders will be much easier. Don't think of it as a dedicated "database" app. Think of the FileMaker platform, including FileMaker Go, more as a general software development tool that happens to be "database-oriented" in the same sense some programming languages are object-oriented.

The main reason is app-flexibility. The app that I'm creating does multiple things for our clients, only a small portion of which are Filemaker-related.

 

Say our app opens up to an interface with about 6-10 buttons. Of those, only two ever interact with our Filemaker databases.

 

Another alternative would be to use FileMaker PHP as sort of a data-access layer to go between the iOS app and the FMP databases, my only issue on that so far has been that if I try to move the PHP files to my web server, I get an error (500). My guess is that I need to configure my IIS server's PHP to be able to communicate with Filemaker? (Server is Windows Server 2008r2 with IIS7.5 and PHP 5.3.19, Filemaker server is v.10 running on Xserver 10.6.2. I'd rather serve the PHP from the Windows server as the Xserve doesn't have a whole lot of horsepower and isn't very scalable in comparison.)