Flex4FileMaker - New Open Source Adobe Flex 2 API to FileMaker

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!

3 Comments so far

  1. dlw on April 19th, 2007

    Hi,
    I’m new to Flex and trying to get this working on my local setup - when I go to Run I am getting two errors; lines 40 and 78, Type was not found or was not a compile-time constant: Filemkaer. (and FilemakerResultEvent)

    I’m guessing I don’t have the project setup right in Flex, but I could use some help - any chance you can give me a step by step on how to get it working locally?

    thanks,
    David

  2. ZuZu on July 21st, 2007

    Hi!

    Been trying this with FMS9 and have not been able to make a connection yet. Actually, what I am finding is that the flex sample app is killing my FMS server service. Has anyone tread here yet with FMS9 and achieved the desired result?

  3. Luke Pillow on July 21st, 2007

    ZuZu,

    This was originally written for FMS 8-8.5. I had not tested this at all against FMS9. I actually haven’t even looked at the changes in the new web publishing engine to see if the schema has changed. Please post back here if you figure out what’s causing the problems. I would strongly encourage you to dive into the source code available at http://code.google.com/p/flex4filemaker/ to help better understand what’s going on. I currently have no intentions to make flex4filemaker FMS9 compatible, but would be happy if you or anyone else is interested in joining the project.

Leave a reply