Reconnect Sydney 2023 Recap

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For the first time in more than three years the Claris FileMaker developer community in the APAC region gathered in-person again for the Reconnect.Sydney 2023 conference last week. Around 100 developers from Australia and New Zealand came together to learn and network for two days, catching up with old friends and making new ones.We even had conference swag and professionally printed name badges!

As a speaker, sponsor and one of the organisers it was a busy two days. Reconnect.Sydney was organised by FileMaker developers for FileMaker developers and organising conferences is definitely not part of our day jobs. There were a few nerves in the days leading up to the conference but once the opening keynote was underway it felt very familiar like FileMaker DevCons of yore. There was a definite buzz in the air and the quality of the sessions were excellent. I really enjoyed the ‘Mobile Tyre Shop – COO perspective’ session by Jamie Cartwright (and Databuzz customer!). Hopefully this will be a future Claris testimonial and Claris need have a video of this on their home page.

Huge thanks to all the other organisers for helping to make this such a great conference:

We were also very lucky to have ten sponsors who all helped make the conference a huge success. Special thanks to our principal sponsor Claris:

I’m looking forward to the next instalment of Reconnect.fm in Brisbane in September 2024. If you would like to be notified about future Reconnect events please sign up for the mailing list here. I’ve uploaded the slides from my ‘A Beginner’s Guide to the FileMaker OData API’ presentation with an update on some of the questions that I couldn’t answer on the day.

My next stop on the road to Claris Engage 2024 is the EngageU conference in Antwerp, Belgium from November 12–14, 2023 where I’ll be presenting two sessions.

fmAccounting Link (QuickBooks Online Edition) Now Supports Webhooks

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We’ve just released a free update to fmAccounting Link (QuickBooks Online Edition), our FileMaker solution that integrates with the QuickBooks Online Accounting platform, to support QuickBooks Online Webhooks. We now support webhooks using either Claris Connect or our supplied PHP file. Claris Connect now includes a free tier which includes up to 500 flow steps each month – if you haven’t used Claris Connect before now is a great time to try it out and take advantage of the free tier.

Webhooks allow you to subscribe to automatically receive notifications from QuickBooks Online when certain events happen. We’ve included support for the following QuickBooks Online event triggers:

  • Customers: create and update
  • Invoices: create and update
  • Payments: create and update

You can easily add support for additional event triggers by following the pattern we have used in our FileMaker scripts.

Once you have setup Webhooks for your required event triggers the fmAccounting Link file will automatically update when one of the events is triggered. For example if a new Payment is created in QuickBooks Online fmAccounting Link will be notified and also created a new Payment record linked to an Invoice, automatically updating the amount owing.

Webhooks save you from having to continually poll QuickBooks Online to check for new records that you wish to download into the fmAccounting Link file.

You can get more information and instructions for setting up webhooks on our support site here. We have a video showing the Create Payment event trigger webhook in action below (or watch directly on YouTube here)

The full list of changes are listed in the version history notes here. Existing customers can download this version from the link on your original order email or your Databuzz account if you created an account with us with your order.

Reconnect.Sydney Session Topics Now Online

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The list of session topics and speakers for the Reconnect.Sydney 2023 Claris FileMaker Developer conference is now on the Reconnect.Sydney website (some speaker profiles are still being loaded). It includes both speakers from Claris (APAC and USA) and experienced developers in the APAC community. We’re excited to announce that Databuzz will be a conference sponsor this year and I will also be giving a talk on ‘A Beginner’s Guide to the FileMaker OData API’.

We now have 9 companies sponsoring the conference – I’d like to thank the sponsors from outside the APAC region in particular for their support, including FMTraining.tv, Monkeybread Software, Productive Computing University and Proof+Geist. Special thanks to Claris for being the Principle Sponsor as well and helping make this conference a reality.

Tickets can be purchased via the Reconnect.Sydney website – remember sales are limited to the first 200 people so don’t leave it too late to purchase your ticket as we do expect this event to be sold out. There is an early bird discount for purchases before 30 June ($219) which reverts to $249 after that date. Your ticket also includes lunch, morning and afternoon teas over both days.

I look forward to meeting up with members of the Claris FileMaker Developer Community once again in July. If you would like a demonstration of any of our Claris FileMaker integrations solutions for Xero, DocuSign, QuickBooks Online, WooCommerce, Shopify, or SMS/MMS messaging at the conference please get in touch or reach out at the conference.

fmESignature Link and Composite Templates

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When we released v1.0 of fmESignature Link (DocuSign Edition), our Claris FileMaker solution for integrating with the DocuSign eSignature platform, we decided on using a ‘Template’ model that supported directly uploading PDF files or using DocuSign hosted Templates. This allowed you to generate a PDF (either a static PDF or one generated from a FileMaker layout) and upload that along with a list of recipients and where they needed to sign etc, or simply specify a DocuSign Template ID and upload the list of recipients and their roles.

These supported methods for creating the DocuSign envelope from FileMaker have been easy for our customers to understand and implement in their existing FileMaker solutions. There are times though when these simple envelope creation models won’t support your requirements that might involve multiple documents/templates and authentication requirements.

For more complex envelopes DocuSign also support the composite templates model, which is the most flexible envelope creation model. With the composite templates model you can create complex envelopes which cannot be handled by the direct document or DocuSign Template models, such as when you need to send both a PDF document and include a DocuSign Template.

Some examples of composite templates that we’ve helped customers integrate over the past few years include:

  • a payment processing company needed to send a DocuSign Template that included multiple documents, in person signers and SMS verification
  • a talent agency needed to send an envelope that included both a FileMaker generated PDF as well as a standard DocuSign Template and dynamically assign recipients and roles to both documents

None of the above use cases were possible with the standard direct document/DocuSign Template models. We were able to work with these customers to create some custom FileMaker scripts and Templates in their fmESignature Link file to meet their requirements. If you would like to discuss implementing a composite template for your fmESignature Link (DocuSign Edition) integration please get in touch.

You can get more information about DocuSign Composite Templates at the following articles:

FileMaker Brighton User Group QuickBooks Online Presentation

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Last March I presented at the FileMaker Brighton User Group meetup on our latest FileMaker integration solution: fmAccounting Link (QuickBooks Online Edition). It was a very lively meeting with lots of great questions and feedback – I demonstrated the how you can connect FileMaker with QuickBooks Online to eliminate double data entry and save your company time and money.

The recording is now available and you can watch it below or directly on YouTube:

You can get more information about fmAccounting Link (QuickBooks Online Edition) on our website here and download a free 14 day trial version. If you would like us to speak at your next Claris FileMaker meetup please contact us here.

FileMaker 2023 Platform Compatibility Update

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Last week Claris released the FileMaker 2023 Platform and we’re pleased to report that all Databuzz products are compatible with the FileMaker 2023 Platform (also referred to as FileMaker Pro v20, FileMaker Server v20 and FileMaker Go v20). Using the current shipping versions of our integration solution we tested the core functionality using FileMaker Pro v20 and haven’t encountered any issues. Here’s a summary of what we tested

fmSMS – we have sent messages from multiple SMS Gateways, checked Account balances, downloaded incoming messages and checked the status of sent Messages successfully.

fmMMS – we have sent messages from multiple MMS Gateways, checked Account balances, downloaded incoming messages and checked the status of sent Messages successfully.

fmAccounting Link (QuickBooks Online Edition) – we have been able to authenticate, download from QuickBooks Online to FileMaker and upload from FileMaker to QuickBooks Online successfully.

fmAccounting Link (Xero Edition) – we have been able to authenticate, download from Xero to FileMaker and upload from FileMaker to Xero successfully.

fmEcommerce Link (WooCommerce Edition) – we have been able to authenticate, download from WooCommerce to FileMaker and upload from FileMaker to WooCommerce successfully

fmEcommerce Link (Shopify Edition) – we have been able to authenticate, download from Shopify to FileMaker and upload from FileMaker to Shopify successfully

fmESignature Link (DocuSign Edition) – we have been able to send a signing request, check the status, download the completed PDF and form data successfully.

fmAccounting Link (MYOB AccountRight Edition) – we have been able to authenticate, download from AccountRight to FileMaker and upload from FileMaker to AccountRight successfully.

If you encounter any issues with any of our products and FileMaker 2023 Platform please let us know. We’ll be writing more articles about some of the new features in the FileMaker 2023 Platform over the coming weeks – you can subscribe to our newsletter to be notified when they are released or follow us on Twitter or Facebook.

Accessing Base Tables in Claris FileMaker 2023

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With the release of the Claris FileMaker 2023 platform this month it is now even easier to retrieve a list of Base Tables in your FileMaker solution. Claris FileMaker Pro 2023 – also referred to as FileMaker Pro v20.1 – includes a number of new functions that can be used to replace previous methods that used the ExecuteSQL function to query the system tables.

FileMaker Pro 20 introduced the following new functions:

  • GetBaseTableName returns the base table name of a provided field. You can find this function in the Miscellaneous group of functions.
  • BaseTableNames and BaseTableIDs return information about the base tables instead of all table occurrences. You can find these functions in the Design group of functions.

With the BaseTableNames function you can quickly generate a list of all base table names in specified file. For example:

BaseTableNames ( "" )

returns a list of base tables in the current file. An example of the result when using our fmSMS solution is a simple list of all the base tables for the file:

Accounts
BulkSessions
Contacts
CountryCodes
DeliveryReceipts
GatewayCodes
Gateways
Interface
MergeFields
Messages
Navigation
Replies
Senders
ServerSideErrors
Templates
Webhooks

The important point to note is that the BaseTableNames function returns the same list regardless of the table occurrences on the relationship graph. If you delete every table occurrence on the graph:

you will still get a list of all the tables that appear on the Tables tab of the Manage Database dialog box:

This is a big improvement over previous methods that used the ExecuteSQL function to query the system tables which relied on the table occurrences on the relationship graph for the results. Furthermore if you used the new query syntax introduced with FileMaker Pro 19.4.1:

ExecuteSQL ( "SELECT DISTINCT BaseTableName FROM FileMaker_BaseTableFields" ; "" ; "" )

any tables that had no defined fields would not be included in the results. The BaseTableNames function returns all the base table names regardless of the relationship graph or number of fields defined for each table, a big improvement over the the ExecuteSQL query method.

Claris have also made some changes to the ExecuteSQL query options in FileMaker Pro v20.1 as well – using the ExecuteSQL function you can now access a FileMaker_BaseTables system table. The new schema contains the following fields:

  • BaseTableName – the table name
  • BaseTableId – the table ID
  • Source – the source (<internal>, MYSQL, etc.)
  • ModCount – the number of times the table has been modified

For example the following query:

ExecuteSQL ( "SELECT * FROM FileMaker_BaseTables" ; "" ; "" )

returns the following:

Accounts,143,<Internal>,51
BulkSessions,132,<Internal>,24
Contacts,130,<Internal>,32
CountryCodes,133,<Internal>,3
DeliveryReceipts,134,<Internal>,22
GatewayCodes,144,<Internal>,8
Gateways,135,<Internal>,71
Interface,136,<Internal>,16
MergeFields,137,<Internal>,3
Messages,141,<Internal>,52
Navigation,145,<Internal>,10
Replies,139,<Internal>,28
Senders,140,<Internal>,8
ServerSideErrors,146,<Internal>,6
Templates,142,<Internal>,8
Webhooks,147,<Internal>,11

If you’re just after the Base Table Name you can use the following query:

ExecuteSQL ( "SELECT  BaseTableName FROM FileMaker_BaseTables" ; "" ; "" )

which returns the same results as the BaseTableNames function.

You can get more information on querying the FileMaker System Tables in earlier versions of FileMaker Pro in our earlier posts on this topic:

fmMMS Now Supports Tall Bob MMS Gateway

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fmMMS, our FileMaker solution that lets you send and receive MMS messages from the Claris FileMaker Platform, has just been updated to include support for the Tall Bob MMS Gateway based in Australia. With fmMMS and Tall Bob you can send and receive MMS messages to Australian mobile numbers. Tall Bob provide a complete mobile messaging platform, delivered with clever functionality, rich interactivity and unprecedented insights.

You can download a trial version of fmMMS to test with the Tall Bob MMS Gateway from here. More information on using the Tall Bob Gateway with fmMMS is available on our support site.

fmSMS, our FileMaker solution for sending and receiving SMS messages from the Claris FileMaker Platform, has also been updated to support the Tall Bob SMS Gateway.

fmAccounting Link (QuickBooks Online Edition) Update

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It’s been just over a month since we released fmAccounting Link (QuickBooks Online Edition), our Claris FileMaker solution that integrates with the QuickBooks Online accounting platform. We’ve spoken to lots of FileMaker users in that time who are looking to connect their FileMaker solution with QuickBooks Online to eliminate double data entry and human errors. Automating the exchange of data between FileMaker and QuickBooks Online saves your company significant time, money and hassle.

We’ve got customers in Canada, USA, UK and Australia who are already seeing the benefits of the fmAccounting Link (QuickBooks Online Edition) solution. We’ve been very busy over the past few weeks talking to them and getting feedback about new features they would like to see in future versions of fmAccounting Link.

We’ve already released 8 updates in the past month with new features such as Bill Payments, Journal Entries, Purchases (Expenses) and our first report (Transaction List). Based on the feature requests we have received you can expect to see more updates over the next few months.

If you have any suggestions for features you would like to see in future versions of fmAccounting Link (QuickBooks Online Edition) please get in touch. You can download a free trial version from our support site if you would like to test drive fmAccounting Link (QuickBooks Online Edition).

fmSMS Now Supports Tall Bob SMS Gateway

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fmSMS, our FileMaker solution for sending and receiving SMS messages from the Claris FileMaker Platform, has been updated to support the Tall Bob SMS Gateway based in Australia.

Tall Bob provide a complete mobile messaging platform, delivered with clever functionality, rich interactivity and unprecedented insights. Tall Bob also support sending MMS messages and we’ll be releasing an update to fmMMS with support for the Tall Bob Gateway shortly.

You can download a trial version of fmSMS to test with the Tall Bob SMS Gateway from the Databuzz website. More information on using the Tall Bob Gateway with fmSMS is available on our support site.