Claris FileMaker Platform is AMAZING!!
By Jan Stieperaere.
How amazing is the Claris FileMaker Platform?
It’s more than 10 years now that I’m a professional Claris FileMaker Developer.
But today I was again amazed about how complete, versatile and powerful the features of the platform is.
And that, just out-of-the-box!
A little bit of context
10 years ago: we built a CRM and ERP for a client. In ‘the old days’ we made a link to their webshops backend ( a MySQL database ) using the built-in ESS capabilities of Claris FileMaker.
Our custom 2-way sync with the MySQL tables ran flawlessly for over 10 years. Great!
Back to today: the webshop is outdated and our client decided to let a web company build a brand new webshop. After a quick analysis with the website builders programmer, we decided to use the modern approach of data exchange. The obvious choice to use our Claris FileMaker REST Data API was made. And of we go!
Exciting! Let’s build it!
Now, the amazing, mind-blowing, and cool stuff happened. In less than 6 hours, I managed to analyze, set up, deploy and document a full REST API for the webshop builder to access all the necessary data!
In detail:
| Hours | Task |
| 1h | to analyze which data must be accessible → this was more or less the same as for the previous webshop |
| 2h | to create 15 layouts for the different API endpoints → articles, article groups, customers, contacts, addresses, … → all in our development version of the app of course |
| 1h | to set up an account, privilege-set and set the record-level security so the API can only read the data he is supposed to |
| 1h | to activate the Data API and testing in Postman |
| 1h | documenting a collection of API calls and sending mail to the webshop builder. |
How amazing is that!
After less than a day of work and just by ‘activating’ the Claris FileMaker Data API switch, I ended up with a beta version of the needed REST API. This is to pull/query all the necessary data out of our system to supply to the webshop.
Amazing, mind-blowing, cool, … are all understatements!
We do tailor-made development, so of course, there will be adjustments needed in the future, but for a beta version of the API, this should do.
My client and the webshop builder were happy & amazed with the quick result and I could leave the office with a smile on my face!
Thanks Claris for making my day!
