FileMaker 13.0v2 shipped today. One of the things that got fixed was the FileMaker Pro URL protocol. Previously you could only use the URL protocol with FileMaker Go, or with FileMaker Pro hosted files.  If you wanted to talk to FileMaker Pro files that were local on your machine you were out of luck.  13.0v2 fixes this (mostly – see limitation below ).

This is big news and has a wide reaching impacts. I’ll have a lot more to say on it soon. But for now, let me just point out that one of the things it does is make integrating the FileMaker WebViewer with FileMaker itself easier. You can now call scripts from web apps, and web pages running in FileMaker WebViewers. We make heavy use of this technique in two of our products, GoSign and GoDraw. Now it will be easier to get these kinds of apps to work.

If your curious about this sort of thing you might want to check out the above mentioned products, or the free ModularFileMaker.org Module,  “Watermark” that makes use of this technique as well. There is a unlocked demo file you can tear apart if you want.

There is still a limitation on Windows.  FileMaker’s WebViewer is powered by Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer doesn’t allow long URLs. That means you can’t pass back long parameters to scripts.  I think the length is about 500 characters, but I’ll have to test it again. [ UPDATE  – 4/4/2014] It looks like that limit is 2048 characters.

more soon…