There are many ways to boost your FileMaker solution’s capabilities by going outside of the scope of typical platform functionality. For example, you can adopt one of the many plugins available on the market; you could partner with an experienced developer to customize functionality from the ground up and integrate with the tools and APIs provided by other software. A good example is emailing. For this, the FileMaker platform has native capabilities. You can leverage plugins to get additional features or integrate with any of the Outlook APIs.
However, you have an often overlooked third option – microservices.
Leveraging Microservices in FileMaker
Microservices are aptly named – they’re pieces of functionality that perform small tasks. The term refers to a software architecture style of connecting small features together to create one larger cohesive system. Leveraging this type of development makes sense as your business evolves, and your solution requires new functionality for more use cases, or to have functionality shared among different systems built on different platforms.
Microservices also restrict one addition or bug from crashing an entire system by limiting access to one small part of it. This simplifies deployment and security of new features.
Microservices are tiny web services. The ‘micro’ part refers to the number of lines of code in the functionality. You can write microservices in any language that support web services, including PHP, Ruby, .NET, Python, Java, JavaScript, and more. They promote agile systems, as their structure is lightweight, easy to test, and simple to build onto existing systems. In fact, they’re often recyclable, so you can reuse them and share them across other applications and platforms.
Microservices v. Plugins in FileMaker
Microservices also presents distinct advantages over plugins in FileMaker:
- Your choice of code: You can create microservices with a wide variety of coding platforms. You can only create plugins using the C programming language.
- Available on all FileMaker platform clients: You cannot use plugins in FileMaker Go unless you make special provisions. Similarly, plugins require a special version to work on Filemaker Cloud. However, you can use Microservices with any type of FileMaker client.
- No platform dependencies: You must compile plugins for Mac, Windows, and Linux to cover the whole platform. Microservices work out-of-the-box and are agnostic to the client’s platform.
Limitations of FileMaker
Just like plugins, you can use microservices to add functionality to your solution that the FileMaker platform does not offer itself. For example, FileMaker does not provide support for Regular Expressions (RegEx), which work well for finding patterns in text.
Say that you have a bunch of text from an email and you need to check if it contains a US or Canadian postal code and extract that from it. A RegEx expression of
^((d{5}-d{4})|(d{5})|([A-Z]d[A-Z]sd[A-Z]d))$would find instances such as “60607” and “60607-1710” for Chicago, IL or “L9T 8J5” for Milton, ON.
While FileMaker does not do so natively, many other platforms construct a few lines of web service in the following:
In FileMaker, you would use the “Insert From URL” script step to call the microservice and then pass it the text and the expression you’d like to use on it. The microservice would send back the list of matches in JSON format to easily parse with the native JSON functions in FileMaker.
New Ease of Adopting Microservices
Leveraging microservices within FileMaker has been possible for years but has become much easier. Adopting microservices is easy for two big reasons:
- Since FileMaker 16, calling a web service and working with its response is extremely easy. The revamped “insert from URL” script step and its support for cURL takes care of that.
- Every FileMaker Server already enables a web server (IIS on Windows, Apache on macOS). In addition, every FileMaker Server comes with a Node.js server already deployed, ready for you to use. You already have the platform to deploy the microservice on.
Examples of Microservices in FileMaker
My team and I have built a dozen microservices for clients’ FileMaker solutions over the years. For example, we’ve developed forecasting capabilities and specialized data reporting to fit within a legacy FileMaker solution for a biotechnology research organization. Our team has also worked with a national media company to build a connection between its FileMaker solution and Okta identity management capabilities for secure user login.
Other examples include API-to-API mapping when receiving data from SAP systems into FileMaker and pushing data from FileMaker into financial systems. The possibilities are endless and truly depend on your needs and goals within your FileMaker solution.
If your FileMaker solution needs functionality related to difficult or specialized computations, XML and JSON parsing, or API-to-API mapping, I recommend considering building microservices for your system.
Building Your Microservices
If you have questions or would like to add microservices to your FileMaker solution with an experienced partner, contact our team. Our experience in microservices extends well beyond FileMaker, and we’re happy to provide additional insights for your organization and evolving solution.
Great article!