Archive for April, 2007

Flex4FileMaker - New Open Source Adobe Flex 2 API to FileMaker

Posted April 10, 2007 * Comments(3)

There's a new API in town... one that you probably don't know or care about, but...

Well... that's all I've got. Lets try again...

Flex4FileMaker is a new Google Code project that currently allows an Adobe Flex 2 client to access a FileMaker database via the FileMaker Web Publishing Engine. By modeling Flex4FileMaker after the FileMaker API for PHP and leveraging Adobe Flex 2, the library accomplishes it's primary goal of enabling FileMaker developers to inexpensively build new, distributed, "cutting edge" user interfaces to new and existing FileMaker databases.

Some things to consider:

  • The project is young.
  • Flex4FileMaker currently only provides "find" capabilities. (Feel free to join in and help grow this)
  • Columns/properties of resulting Record instances are accessible via "dot" notation
    • aRecord.column_name
    • aRecord.JoinedLayoutName.column_name is equivalent to JoinedLayoutName::column_name
  • Flex 2 applications using Flex4FileMaker are subject to Flash Player's Security sandbox rules
  • The XML result set parsing works, but is probably not the most efficient and should be refactored.
  • Although FileMaker.as constructor accepts a username and password, I wouldn't recommend embedding database credentials in a compiled SWF, but rather accept credentials in the application.

The compiled library can be downloaded and the source is available primarily from the Google Code SVN repository, but has also been published for viewing.

Many thanks to Abdul Qabiz for publishing his HTTPURLLoader that facilitates BASIC HTTP Authentication.

Click here to launch an example application using Flex4FileMaker. Right-click on the application to view and download the source or alternatively download the entire FlexBuilder project source here or from SVN

Enjoy!