Allowing human intervention before an action is executed

At times during an automated workflow, it may be necessary to have a human intervene and make a determination as to whether the next action should take place or not. There are plenty of examples of this, such as an employee vacation request or dispatching a tweet or email campaign. Once again Claris Connect, an IPaaS solution (Integration Platform as a Service), has you covered on this front. In this article, we'll show you how this works.

Gracefully trap for and fix errors in Claris Connect

Even with the most careful of programming, things can go wrong. It's not necessarily the programmer's fault when an error occurs, but we need to try to predict what could go wrong and where. For this reason, we introduce error handling into our flows to check for errors and do something about them when they occur.

And yet again, Claris Connect, an IPaaS solution (Integration Platform as a Service), provides a simple and effective way to trap for errors and take action as a result. Let's investigate how we can error handle within our flow.

Integrating FileMaker into Claris Connect flows

In our previous articles introducing Claris Connect, we've been integrating cloud based services to handle a particular workflow. But we're FileMaker developers at heart. So how does our database fit into all this? 

Well, we're glad you asked, because the answer is pretty darn well! With FileMaker also being a Claris product, those clever folks over there made sure that FileMaker could be used within a flow of Claris Connect. So let's send some data from our flow to a hosted FileMaker database.

Triggering and sending data to a flow from FileMaker in Claris Connect

FileMaker can do literally almost anything, including interacting with APIs. For example, in our previous articles introducing Claris Connect, we've been adding a member to a Mailchimp list. But that process of communicating with the API may not always be so easy. If only there were a way to trigger a Claris Connect flow from within FileMaker. Oh. Wait. There is! Let's see how...

Changes In FileMaker 19 Have Broken Existing Custom Default Fields

Custom default fields were introduced in FileMaker 17 and proved to be immensely useful. The functionality allows for the automatic creation of fields when making a new table, ensuring consistency for fields like primary keys or creation/modification timestamps for example. If you had set this up in 17, when FileMaker 18 was released, they continued to work. But try it with FileMaker 19 and your custom default fields are gone. Don't panic, it's a pretty simple fix.

Warning 156 fms.myserver.com Schedule "HOURLY_BACKUP_USB" aborted; the destination "filemac:/BackUps/" is not writable.

If you upgrade your Mac server to macOS 10.15 Catalina, you might find that your backup schedules to external drives start failing with an error number 156. Although apparently fixed in FileMaker 18.0.4, it's rearing its head again, but there is a simple fix.

Adding Additional Disk Space To An Existing Volume

It’s not uncommon, as a FileMaker database begins to grow, that the volume originally set up on an AWS instance begins to run out of space. To tackle this, you could launch a new instance with a larger volume, but that seems like a bunch of work and there’s a much simpler way of solving this problem. Let’s find out how…

It Might Take A "While" For Us To Achieve This

The JSON functions were introduced in FileMaker 16 and since then, as it's native functionality, we've used these functions for passing around data in script parameters and more. Often times, we'll be, say, clicking a button on a layout and passing multiple JSON formatted script parameters to the script being executed. But we began wondering if there was a quicker way of extracting the parameters into variables in the script, and it turns out there is…

Is your FileMaker Pro 19 installation running as a trial license despite adding the license certificate?

In the process of setting up a machine for a client recently, we encountered an issue where FileMaker Pro 19 was installed, with the license certificate in the downloads folder as it should be, but we were asked for the license certificate each time the app was launched. And when it did launch, the app was in trial mode with an expiration date. But wait, we have a valid license...

How to take advantage of web services' webhooks within a FileMaker database

More and more online services are utilizing webhooks as a resource-light way to respond to an event, often times pushing around some data. So if we as FileMaker developers want to take advantage of these webhooks, how can we go about it? Well, dig in and find out!

What is this new script step in FileMaker 19 and how does it work?

FileMaker 19 introduced some game changing functionality to the platform, including the JavaScript functions and Add-Ons. Another last-minute feature that made it into the release was the Execute FileMaker Data API script step. Documentation is sparse at this time, so we set out to find out what it does and how it works. Let's jump in...

Diagnosing & Fixing A New Installation Of Zabbix 5 Appliance With "Database Error - Connection Refused" Message

If you've recently deployed Zabbix 5 using the downloadable Appliance package and a few hours, days or weeks later you log in and encounter a message telling you "Database Error - Connection Refused", your heart will sink and your plans for the day are likely derailed. All that work setting it up, configuring the templates, adding the hosts and action notifications, wasted... Devastating. You're probably coming to terms with having to spend the day building it from scratch again... But wait! Before you do, read on as it's possible there may be a fairly simple fix!

This seems ominous: omniORB: (0) Warning: SSL CA certificate location is not set. SSL transport disabled.

Working with Claris' FileMaker Server Command Line Interface (CLI) allows you to configure your server to your needs and in some instances allows you to adjust settings that are not available within the Admin Console. When executing commands, if you encounter a warning message that begins "omniORB" followed by the date, time and something to do with the SSL, you may have concerns... And rightly so, "SSL transport disabled" doesn't sound good, right? Well, read on to find out what might be wrong and how to fix it.

Lesson in Brief: What Is Keycloak, Why Use It & Next Steps

Data breaches are already far too common and the IT security industry is ever evolving to combat unauthorized access to systems. So, how can we as FileMaker developers and deployers embrace modern security practices? One way is to utilize an Identity and Access Management solution, such as Keycloak, and in this multi-part series we'll be looking at how to install, configure and connect Keycloak to authenticate users to a FileMaker database.

Lesson in Brief: Installing Ubuntu On A Virtual Machine Utilizing Windows 10

In part one of our Keycloak series, we jump straight in with getting our operating system of choice installed on a virtual machine, ready for Keycloak to be installed. As explained in our introduction blog post, we've chosen to use Ubuntu and Hyper-V on Windows 10, so let's get started on our epic journey!

Lesson in Brief: Installing Keycloak And Configuring Ubuntu

In our previous blog post, we installed Ubuntu on a virtual machine and then applied OS updates, ready for us to install Keycloak which is going to be our authentication server for our users to access our FileMaker database. So, next up, downloading and installing Keycloak. Let's dig in...

Lesson in Brief: Installing A Let's Encrypt SSL Certificate With Auto-Renew

So far in our adventure into the depths of setting up an authentication server, we've installed Ubuntu, installed Keycloak and completed some initial configuration to allow us to log in to the software. We must remember that what we're trying to achieve here is better security and as such having our authentication server be secure is critical. So, we're going to need to have encryption, which means installing a SSL certificate. Let's do this!

Lesson in Brief: Installing MySQL And Configuring Keycloak To Use It

If you've been following our Keycloak series and have survived the previous SSL certificate article, congratulations. We're close to actually getting stuck into Keycloak itself, but we have one last installation item to take care of. Out of the box, Keycloak comes with a relational database called H2, but this is primarily intended for development and testing purposes and is not designed for high concurrency environments. So, we need to set up Keycloak to connect to a more solid database, for which we are going to use MySQL.

Lesson in Brief: Setting Up A Realm, Client, Groups And Users

So far in our Keycloak series we have been setting up the infrastructure for our server to run on, but now that's done we can actually configure Keycloak to act as our authentication server for FileMaker. We'll be using the Keycloak Administrator Console to do this, so let's get logged in and get things set up.

Lesson in Brief: Adjusting External Authentication And Setting Up Groups

In our last article we configured Keycloak with a realm, client, users and more, ready for it to act as our authentication server for our FileMaker database. In the final stretch of our epic Keycloak journey, we turn our attention to FileMaker and the items we need to take care of there to bring this all together. We're almost there, let's get stuck in!