Vote for FileMaker Plugin SDK Ideas
As you may know FileMaker comes with a plugin SDK, which C++ developers like me use to develop plugins. Now the Plugin SDK offers a way to register functions and script steps and provide additional features to the FileMaker developer. The plugin developer can get a list of parameters with the function call and inspect them, e.g. do different things for containers, texts or numbers passed in. And the plugin can return a value as result and the SDK offers functions to return texts, numbers and assemble containers. Over the years we got a few SQL functions to do queries and modify data in the database on behalf of the FileMaker developer. With the evaluate function in the SDK, we can call Get(Functions) or do calculations.
From a plugin we can trigger a script. That means the script call is put on a queue and executed later after the current script finished. But for some reason, we can't trigger a script on FileMaker Server. The plugin SDK doesn't provide the functionality to do this.
In the plugin we can work with styled text stored in FileMaker fields. We use that to format JSON and XML text now. But we can't access alignments in a styled text.
So as a plugin developer I submitted a few ideas over time:
- Provide proper main thread handling for Apple frameworks
- Make Idle work on Server for plugins
- Make FMX_StartScript work on FileMaker Server
- FileMaker could report to user if several versions of the same plugin are installed
- Add alignment to Plugin SDK CharacterStyle class
- Add functions to plugin SDK for style runs
- PluginSDK: ExecuteFileSQL variant with field names
- Plugin SDK: Extend fmx::Data to provide path of external container files
- Plugin SDK: Provide functions to fmx::Data to read any container type to memory
- Plugin SDK: Need FMX_SetToCurrentEnv for Server
- Plugins: Log errors when loading plugins
- Show JPEGs when FILE containers have them
- Plugin SDK: Add more FMX_ExternCallSwitches
- Plugin SDK: ExecuteFileSQL on server
- Get Last Record id from Insert
- Add type getter for fmx::Locale class
Those ideas could help to make a better plugin SDK, which may lead a dozen plugin developers to make better plugins, which hundreds of FileMaker developers could use in thousands of solutions.
PS: Fixed links to point to new Claris community.