FileMaker Pro 6

A strong feature is integrated Web publishing. FileMaker includes a Web Companion plug-in that fully automates the business of serving live data to the Web, using its own built-in Web server. By default, the Web Companion uses fixed designs, but these can be overridden by writing your own FileMaker Web pages using its proprietary CDML tag language.

There are a wide range of CDML tags available, divided into three types. Action tags define a database command, variable tags refer to parameters such as database or layout names, and replacement tags are placeholders for actual data values. The concepts will be familiar to anyone who's worked with other server-side tag languages like PHP or ASP.

The strength of CDML is that it produces highly customised Web pages with dynamic access to FileMaker data. Its weakness is in its proprietary nature: why learn CDML rather than an alternative like ASP, PHP or JSP that can be used with data from any server? Still, if you come at this from the perspective of a FileMaker user needing to extend data access to the Web, this is an impressive technology. As a quick and easy solution, the Web Companion without the use of custom CDML is brilliant.

New to version 6

The 'What's New?' list in FileMaker 6 is surprisingly short - the most significant area is enhanced XML support. Peeking into FileMaker's application directory reveals Xerces and Xalan DLLs, dynamic link libraries from the Apache Software Foundation that provide XML parsing and XSL transformations. This enables a powerful mechanism for importing XML data.

FileMaker has defined its own simple database DTD (Document Type Definition) called FMPXMLRESULT, which is its native XML format. To import XML, you can either have the source application generate data using FileMaker's schema or apply an XSL transformation on the fly, so that any well-formed XML data can be converted. Building a suitable XSL file may not be trivial, but even so it's a useful facility.

The same features are even more useful for data export. FileMaker can export directly either in FMPXMLRESULT or in FMPDSORESULT, a schema compatible with Microsoft's XML Data Source Object for client-side data display in Internet Explorer. However, once again, you can apply an XSL transformation to the data on export, so that other formats such as HTML or an alternative database schema can be created. Alongside CDML, this makes FileMaker a more powerful Web application server. The main snag is that FMPXMLRESULT is rather basic. For example, there are only five field types (Text, Number, Date, Time and Container) with no extra attributes to define the fields more tightly.

Other new features in FileMaker 6 feel more like minor enhancements. For instance, on Mac OS X you can import images directly from a digital camera, and on both platforms you can now store EXIF standard image annotations. There's also a global Find-and-Replace dialog, which will save time in some instances. And Constrain and Extend Found Set is a new feature that lets you filter or supplement the results of a search.

A significant scripting improvement comes with the new Show Custom Dialog script. This lets you build a custom dialog without having to design a form, assigning values to preset options in typical FileMaker style. Mac users will be glad to know that FileMaker now supports OS X services, such as sending text to a mail application, while Windows XP users get fast user-switching support and the reassurance of a 'Designed for Windows XP' logo. There's a format painter in the layout designer, more consistent date conversion and a more secure folder structure in the Web Companion.