Product Reviews

FileMaker has an uneven method for numbering its upgrades. Some deserve a full point, and some don't. FileMaker Pro 8.5 offers relatively few features for a half-point upgrade - but when you take into account the improvements they offer to end users solutions, it's more than warranted.

New iMac and MacBook owners will be pleased to know that 8.5 is a Universal Binary application. FileMaker insists that Intel-based Macs will notice a 50% - 100% speed boost over their PowerPC brethren. FileMaker has also released Universal updates to its server products. (Apart from supporting 8.5 clients, their lack of new server-specific features means that they're being released as Server and Server Advanced 8.0v4.)

The main difference that existing Filemaker Pro 8 users will notice is the inclusion of Web viewers, the 'reason-to-upgrade' feature - layout objects that let you view web pages from your FileMaker documents. You create a web viewer as you would a related records portal: draw the bounding box in layout mode, and specify the set-up in a resulting dialog box. The web viewer dialog box lets you specify a URL, as a fixed plain-text start point, or as a calculation using values from fields from within your FileMaker tables. There are also default site setups to let a novice user create web links to popular info sites such as Google. Each default offers up to five text fields that you complete via straight field data or calculation. For example, FedEx lets you fill in the tracking number. Developers can add their own defaults using XML. Once you've entered your web viewer URL settings, switching to browse mode immediately causes FileMaker to attempt to load the page. If you've tied your viewer to FedEx say, via a field called 'Track This', when you type a new tracking number into the 'Track This' field, up comes the FedEx result - no need to swap back and forth between FMPro and your browser.

Behind

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the scenes, FMPro is making use of Apple's Webkit framework. (The PC uses Explorer - no surprise there.) In essence the web page is being rendered by the same code used by Safari and iTunes. The difference is that, apart from a very simple contextual menu, there are no controls visible on your embedded web page. However, controls within pages - forms, HTTP links, FTP download links, PDFs, Java applets, and Flash movies work as you would expect.

From the developer's point of view, FileMaker has added some script steps and functions designed to make interaction with web viewers easier. Most importantly, though, is the fact that layout objects (including web viewers) can now be named via the object info palette (renamed from the size palette). With this change in place, a new script step lets you 'Go to Object', so you can now, for example, programmatically select tabbed panels, or tab to the specific field. You can even get hold of all the named objects (as a return delimited list) on a layout using the LayoutObjectNames function, and thanks to the GetLayoutObjectAttribute function, you can figure out the properties of the various named objects (for example portals) on your layout, and a dedicated function can tell you which element a user is currently working with.

Using GetLayoutObjectAttribute you can grab the textual content of a web viewer - so you can process a web page that the user is viewing, and strip out information you need from it. Sadly, it's just text - you can't save the rendered image of a page, or stick into a container field (roll on version 9?) You'll also have to do the parsing the hard way, as there's still no support for XML functions.

Developers can directly access named web viewers via the Set Web Viewer script step; this lets you reset the web viewer to the layout-specified start URL, reload the page, go forward, go back, or go to a specific URL. As a helper, there's a new text function - GetAsURLEncoded - that can coerce text to a URL compliant format, and a List function that concatenates values from all the field repetitions, matching related records, or a set of named fields - a souped-up version of Troi's sumText function. In effect, FMPro is now a browser database, greatly expanding the abilities of your database solutions.

FileMaker's web viewers are a compelling reason to upgrade, and for once both the concurrent availability of server products, and realistic pricing mean you shouldn't need to think to hard before you do.