FileMaker® Pro Design & Scripting For Dummies®

Chapter 12. Putting Your Databases on the Web

In This Chapter

• Designing layouts for the Web

• Scripting for the Web

• Publishing the database on the Web

If you're not on the Internet, you're in the dark ages! Your friends treat you like you have a disease. You don't get invited to the trendy coffeehouses. And even your pet cat walks away when you try to get cuddly. Oh, I forgot — the cat always does that, even if you are online.

So FileMaker includes a set of great capabilities for publishing your database applications on the Web — not only because FileMaker folks thrive on going to the trendy coffeehouses, but also because these capabilities enable you to interact with your FileMaker database without having to run a copy of FileMaker. And putting a database on the Web is an easy way to give Linux users access to your database as well, through their browsers. One popular use of this functionality is to publish a product catalog with an order form.

Designing Layouts for the Web

If your FileMaker database application is to be used via the Web, you need to know this ahead of time so that you can design it for the Web. Not all the layout and scripting capabilities of FileMaker work via the Web. Additionally, you might need to make a few design decisions differently for Web-hosted databases, because the toolbar options for a Web database are slightly different from that of a network-shared database.

Keeping a layout Web friendly

Take the following points into consideration when designing your layouts ...