FileMaker® Pro 9 Bible

Chapter 20. Extending FileMaker's Capabilities

There is a great deal to know about FileMaker — so much that doing justice to its native capabilities, without providing coverage of the many related environments, technologies, products, and deployment options, in a book of this size is no small challenge. In this chapter, however, we provide you with a brief survey of products, tools, and techniques available to extend the reach of your solutions.

Many of the technologies we refer to here are the subject of a rich variety of books and other resources in their own right. We encourage you to consider the range of technologies available and choose appropriate resources for further exploration.

Because FileMaker's capabilities are extensive and provide support for wide-ranging functional requirements, you can create many solutions with FileMaker Pro without recourse to external tools or applications. When you reach the limits of the program's native capabilities, however, many options enable you to employ other technologies and push past those limits.

External Scripting Calls

Among FileMaker's 134 ScriptMaker commands are two commands allowing you access to the repertoire of external capabilities made available via your computer's operating system and the scripting languages installed by default on your computer:

Perform AppleScript []

and

      Send Event []

These commands enable you to configure your FileMaker scripts to execute AppleScript code on Mac OS and VBScript code on Windows. These scripting ...