Web Services Free Plug-in for FileMaker
Available for free to the FileMaker Community
The Web Services Plug-in is now available “free, as is”. It provided at no charge for use by your organization — not for commercial redistribution — without technical support.
Support Information
Wiki documentation from the developer (FM::Nexus) includes instructions, available functions and examples.
A knowledge base includes questions and examples.
Connecting FileMaker to the Cloud
The Web Services Plug-in delivers a vast array of possibilities to FileMaker developers who want to integrate web services into their solutions. If you can write FileMaker calculations, then you can interact with web services.
Today’s business systems demand rich and seamless connectivity with all the web has to offer. Need to look up the city and state for a ZIP code? Need live information for a financial services product? Need to upload order or product data for ecommerce? Need parts and service or shipping information from an online service? The Web Services Plug-in opens up a world of possibilities.
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The Web Services Plug-in can connect to both Internet and enterprise web services, and can be used on a local FileMaker client, or installed on your FileMaker Server. |
How it works
The Web Services Plug-in reads a SOAP service’s WSDL (Web Services Description Language) file and exposes the Web Service methods as FileMaker functions, allowing you to integrate these functions directly into your FileMaker system.
The Web Services Plug-in also includes HTTP client functions for accessing REST APIs, often provided by large-scale web applications. These functions can retrieve, parse and store data from REST web service responses in your solutions, instead of using Web Viewers.
What’s new in Web Services Plug-in v3.5?
Web Services Plug-in includes support for accessing RESTful APIs.
Web Services Plug-in also includes built-in standards-based XML and JSON parsers (new in v3.5) for fast and reliable handling of service responses. Instead of guess-timating with FileMaker’s text manipulation functions or laboriously building your own custom functions, your FileMaker project now has access to XPATH and JSON query engines for precision response parsing. The WSP XPATH and JSON query functions are also flexible enough to handle parsing of XML and JSON data your solution has access to, not just Web Services responses.
Web Services Plug-in supports client certificate authentication for environments where it is required.
IMPORTANT: When registered, v3.5 requires a 3.x license key. If you call the registration function without the correct license key (including for older versions), the plug-in will not function correctly.
What are Web Services?
Web Services provide a standard way for one system to share data and make its functionality available to others. The Web Services Plug-in allows you to make useful and feature-rich FileMaker solutions by integrating dynamic third-party data. Examples include postal code lookups, address verifications, currency conversions, SMS text message sending, ecommerce orders, shipping rates, stock quote lookups, and more. In addition, enterprise products from SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, IBM and others often support Web Services, allowing you to connect the FileMaker solutions in your organization to other internal, external or business partner systems.
Stock Quote is a very simple demo file which uses a free web service. You can download a copy of the Stock Quote demo. |
What is a WSDL?
The Web Services Plug-in includes a parser for the Web Services Description Language (“WSDL”), a standard XML-based format for describing SOAP web services. A “WSDL” is a definitions of remote methods (functions) the service provide, necessary to access them. With the Web Services Plug-in, any service described by a WSDL can be accessed by your FileMaker application using ordinary FileMaker function calls automatically generated by the plug-in.
Sites that provide directories of many useful web services include XMethods, ProgammableWeb, and webserviceX.NET.
Subscription-based services from providers like CDYNE, StrikeIron, or Xignite.
Major web companies such as eBay, Amazon, PayPal, FedEx and Google also provide REST or SOAP APIs to help application developers embed and extend their services.
Compatibility
Web Services Plug-in 3.5 works with v9, v10, and v11 of FileMaker Pro and FileMaker Server.
For Mac OS X or Mac OS X Server, v10.5 (Leopard) or 10.6 (Snow Leopard) is currently required on the computer (or computers) running the Plug-in.
For Windows, Windows XP or later, or Windows Server 2003 or later is required on the computer (or computers) running the Plug-in.