Instant Web Publishing with FileMaker Pro 7 & 8

by Bob Patin

Instant Web Publishing has finally come of age. With the release of FileMaker Pro 7, IWP became a robust, useful alternative to custom web publishing for FileMaker Pro.

IN A NUTSHELL, Instant Web Publishing allows you to put your FileMaker Pro 7 or 8 database on the web without the creation of any custom pages for interfacing with the database. When a user visits your IWP page, he or she will see a screen that shows your layouts exactly as you designed them. As you will see in a moment, this has both pluses and minuses, however, but let's focus on the pluses first.

Before FileMaker Pro 7, Instant Web Publishing was not very useful. The layouts you so carefully designed were ignored by IWP; instead, default pages were used, and they didn't allow for any thinking outside a very cramped box. Most FileMaker Pro users ignored IWP, and instead turned to custom web publishing, using tools such as CDML or Lasso. Using custom pages, FileMaker-driven web sites could be as complex as you wished; some very advanced sites were created using FileMaker and custom web publishing.

However, custom web publishing was not for the inexperienced web designer, and required at least a working knowledge of Lasso or CDML (which is essentially a subset of Lasso). To design a simple membership search system for a site, for example, would take several hours of CDML or Lasso programming, while the same functionality is built into FileMaker itself. Once a database is designed, it's a simple matter to perform a search using FIleMaker's FIND functionality.

How does this work in IWP? Simple. Design a database, and put a button on a layout that will perform the FIND. Put the database on the web using IWP, and it will work the same in users' browsers. Great, isn't it!

Your users will see exactly the same layout as you see when you open your database in FileMaker Pro. Each piece of artwork, each custom button, each color choice will display the same in the user's browser. Design the database once, use it for both local work and for access on the web. So why then, are there any minuses at all? This all sounds perfect, doesn't it?

Almost. Let's cover the basics:

IWP requires the use of FIleMaker 7 (or 8) Server Advanced, which ships with the FileMaker Web Publishing Engine. The Web Publishing Engine (WPE) does all of the heavy lifting: it creates a web-friendly page on the fly from your layout, presents it to your browser, makes all the magic happen that will allow you to interact with the database from inside any modern browser.

Because the WPE has to do this page creation, the speed with which it creates pages will have everything to do with how graphics-intensive your layouts are. If you've used your artistic skills to the max, adding custom buttons, logos, background images, and so on, your page will be slow to load. For this reason, it's a wise plan to curb your use of graphics for layouts that will be used on the web.

There are some scripts that don't work in IWP. For example, your database may have a dialog box that pops up, telling the user that he has successfully performed some task. Sorry, your dialog boxes won't work with IWP; you'll have to communicate with the user in a different way. A simple method is to use a field to display alert text to the user.

If you have a login screen where users supply a password, this password won't be displayed as bullets as we're used to seeing on the web and in most applications. Instead, it will show as normal text, which is readable by anyone who happens to view the screen. A simple workaround for this is to set the field to use light grey text--if you change the text to white, the user won't know whether he's actually typed into the password field; if you use light grey, it'll be practically unreadable to the casual snoop, but still legible to the user.

Some functions require careful thought; for example, if your user is not granted any editing privileges, yet you want to generate a log that records each visit to the database, you will need to create a script that is set to run with full privileges, so that the user, when clicking a button that triggers this script, will be able to run the script that generates a log entry.

For many web uses, Instant Web Publishing is a wonderful tool which saves money and gets a solution to the web in a very short time. Longterm Solutions, as a longtime FileMaker hosting company, hosts IWP databases for many of our clients; we generally prefer custom publishing because it offers unlimited possibilities in the web interface and in programming options, but recommend IWP often to clients whose needs are simple and who don't want to incur the expense of custom-developed pages.

If you are planning to put your database on the web and would like to try IWP for a month or two, contact us and we will be happy to host your database for you.