Need to get content in or out of a FileMaker container in a straight forward way? We’ve got you covered.
How does container bridge work?
There are three things you can do:
- GET from your container using a simple link. This lets you do things like send an email with a link to container content or embed container content in your website.
- POST to your container with a record UUID included in the URL to update the content of a specific container.
- POST to your container without a UUID which will create a new record in the table with the submitted container content.
What do I need to do?
There are a few steps required to get up and running but in no time you can have users either pushing data in, or pulling it out, of your containers. A lot of the motivation for us to add this functionality was the number of times people asked in the FM BetterForms Slack channel about working with containers.
To get set up:
- Create a connection to your database. It’s worth reading about the security requirements and considerations when doing this.
- Add a ‘metadata’ field to the table your container is in, which references that field.
- Create an FM-API container.
If your connection is using the Data API (with FMS 17+) then you’re done. If you’re using another connection type then you’ll also need to add a script to your app as the other connection types don’t support direct access to containers. Note that this precludes the use of ODBC as the connection type.
Now you’re ready to start using your container, there are a few other things you need to know, especially for uploading content.
If your goal is to use this with FM BetterForms, then we recommend using DropZone as the uploader with some specific configuration. Check out the example form for further details.