Today we are making bBox, our toolbox of external functions for FileMaker, freely available to all FileMaker developers. Use it to extend the reach of your FileMaker solutions to resources outside of FileMaker by launching and communicating with other programs, utilizing the powerful commands built-in to Mac OS X, and easily creating, processing, and managing […]

Passing values between FileMaker and AppleScript can be a pain. Sure, you can use a named field and table in FileMaker to do this, but if you (or someone else) ever changes either of the names your AppleScript routine breaks. So, even though its not the most efficient way to do things, for short routines […]

[Authored by Ian] I’ve been doing work on a couple projects integrating Rails with FileMaker Pro (FMP) over HTTP. There are a few different FMP features and plugins the FMP developers use to connect to Rails, none of which I truly grok. Notwithstanding my lack of FMP knowledge, I wanted to write-up what I expect […]

ValueCount ( FilterValues ( lst ; value ) ) Ben Miller and I came up with this tiny little function to tell us how many times a specific value occurs in a list.

If you’re working with data from outside of FileMaker, you’ll commonly have to work with dates that FileMaker’s GetAsDate function won’t understand. To handle this, I created a custom function that allows conversion of a wide variety of date formats. Some examples of how the function works:

[Authored by Ian] I’ve probably written a hundred render_not_found methods in my life as a Rails dev. Usually they just render a static file under /public, and maybe, if I’m feeling nice, give an XML response. No more!

In beezwax’s webdev division we generally work in pairs, but our commit logs didn’t used to show this. We wouldn’t bother to reconfigure the git author every time we sat down with a new pair so our git log only recorded one of the programmers’ names. Bryan Helmcamp has a nice script […]

[Authored by Sam] [01/04/15 – Editor’s note: This post was written in 2008. In 2015 we don’t use this “reverse ssh tunnel” method much anymore, but the technique is still interesting.] In my last post I described how to use reverse ssh tunnels and screen -x to setup a remote pair programming environment.

[Authored by Sam] [01/04/15 – Editor’s note: This post was written in 2008. In 2015 we don’t use this “reverse ssh tunnel” method much anymore, but the technique is still interesting.] There’s a lot of talk about remote pair programming, but the fact is it can be a pain to set up.  Using iChat screen […]

[Authored by Ian] In my last post, I described my preferred methodology for integrating Rails and FMP. In this post, I’ll discuss an alternative technique using FMP’s external SQL sources functionality. Since IANAFMPD (I am not a FileMaker Pro Developer), I’ll skip the implementation details and just cut to when it’s an appropriate solution.

[Authored by Ian] Here’s a synopsis of my findings on integrating Rails with FMP. Goals: allow two-way data transmission between FileMaker Pro (FMP) and Rails minimize development time required for both FMP and Rails accommodate as many clients (which may be another application written with FMP, Rails, or anything else) as possible