From the course: FileMaker: Tips, Tricks, and Techniques

Deploying using FileMaker WebDirect - FileMaker Pro Tutorial

From the course: FileMaker: Tips, Tricks, and Techniques

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Deploying using FileMaker WebDirect

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- [Instructor] FileMaker WebDirect is a web-based deployment technology that reproduces a majority of the FileMaker Pro user experience in supported web browsers. FileMaker WebDirect can deploy apps that are created specifically for a web browser for up to 500 users. They don't need an installed version of FileMaker Pro to be able to access. It's pretty cool technology, actually. So in this video, I'm going to show you how you can prep your environment for hosting and then also prep your file, and then I'm going to give you a quick tour of what FileMaker WebDirect looks like in a browser. So first you have to make sure that you have a copy of FileMaker Server. And when you have a copy of FileMaker Server, you'll log into the admin console and you'll go over to connectors, and the first section of connectors is web publishing, and you're going to see here FileMaker WebDirect. You're going to want to make sure that that's enabled. And if it is enabled, then you're going to click on the launch center link. And we're going to get back to this, because this is where you're going to see any FileMaker databases that are enabled for web publishing. And if you look at the URL, which is the URL or the IP address of your server, forward slash fmi, forward slash webd, that's what you can distribute to your users so they can find the databases via the web browser. But first let's talk about how you prep your database. Most of it has to do with security. If you go into manage security and then log into your application, you want to make sure that you've got an active account that's assigned to a privilege set that has the fmwebdirect extended privilege assigned to it. As a matter of fact, if you go over to extended privileges and double click on fmwebdirect, you can see if any of the existing privilege sets already have this assigned. I just have the three default ones here. You can see that none of them have any of the WebDirect assigned, so I'm going to have to check this box if I want to access this via WebDirect. I would also say that you probably want to check out some of your scripts if there are scripts that you're planning on running from within the web browser. You can open up the script and you'll see this icon right here. If you select the icon for FileMaker WebDirect, as long as you don't see anything grayed out, then your scripts are going to be okay to run. Most of the scripts are supported. There's just some things that might have to access your desktop or other files. Those are the types of things that are grayed out. But for the most part, a quick review of all my scripts looks like I'm okay for WebDirect. And now I want to upload the file to FileMaker Server. So I would go in here, I'll set a password, and then I'll close it for uploading. Pick the server that has FileMaker WebDirect enabled. Dismiss those security settings. And if you don't see them, that's because you have properly set up your SSL encryption. Log into the server using the admin console login. Upload. And now I can log into the database using FileMaker Pro. And that's not necessary for WebDirect, but just to kind of show you a quick side by side, here's the database in FileMaker Pro on this side, and I'm going to go over to WebDirect and refresh it. Now I see the database is available in the web browser. So if I click on it, it's asking me to log in. I can save that password if I want to, but I'm going to say no. And now you see that I have an experience that's very similar to the desktop. As a matter of fact, if we look at these side by side, the experience is somewhat undetectable. To make it fair, I will go to the customer's web layout so that you can actually see a true side by side comparison here. So we'll go all the way to the top for both of them. These are the actual layouts that you see side by side. You'll see that things like drop down lists are supported in FileMaker. Navigating to the various different layouts, popovers, scripts, portals, you name it, all sorts of stuff is supported, including printing, which is supported in WebDirect, which was introduced in the previous version of FileMaker. You'll also see that you have full control over navigating through the file. You can do things like create new records, insert data, run scripts. But some of my favorite are the fact that you can import records into your FileMaker database using the WebDirect option. Pretty interesting. I think you'll find that pretty much everything that you would hope would be supported is going to be supported in WebDirect. Don't take my word for it, though. Go ahead and test it out on your own and see if maybe this is a good option for you. The only things that are really required are that you have one or more account with a privilege set set to fmwebdirect. You'll need to have a user license that supports WebDirect, and please see FileMaker for that. I am not a source of license information. You can contact FileMaker for information on what requirements you'll need from a licensing standpoint. And then you can access the homepage using the web address that you see here. You just insert in your domain or IP. I really urge you to play around with this a little bit, upload it to this server that you have, take a look at what that user experience is like, and see if this is something that you can leverage. It might not necessarily be a good fit for, like, stores for your website or something like that, or high-traffic unknown users, but it really is ideal for reaching out to partners or vendors or some small groups of customers who do not have a FileMaker Pro installation but still want to interact with your database.

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