FileMaker with Drafts?

Actions - Help & Questions
1

I’ve been looking at FileMaker as a solution for a few needs, but haven’t jumped in the water yet. While I’ve heard from a podcast I follow how well Drafts works with AirTable, there’s a few reasons I think FileMaker will work better, but I wanted to ask anyone on here using it: How well does Drafts integrate with FileMaker? I’m struggling with the documentation of its URL schemes, but I’m hoping that I can select a field to put text directly in in a database, maybe to sort it later, maybe to select it as I’m firing the Drafts action.

Is this doable? Or is FileMaker not something I can really integrate with Drafts?

2

Yes but there’s a big learning curve b/c you’ll need to learn FM’a scripting language - but you’ll get a level of customisability and scriptability that’s vastly ahead of AirTable. And 99% of it works on iOS in FM Go just as it does on the desktop.

BUT there isn’t an economical single user sync solution with FM. I have a couple of reference only databases on my iOS devices (i.e. copy on my Mac and iOS versions get copied over but don’t sync back), and I have created Drafts actions that call various search scripts set up in FM.

There are also ways to work around the lack of sync (besides running FileMaker Server) - the easiest being to write your changes / new entries to a csv and read that back into the master database (or have Hazel do it for you).

FM 17 (I run 16) has been further optimised for building iOS versions of databases. And you can do cool stuff - I have one database with a ton of links to files on my mac - but I have a script in the iOS layout that calls workflow and opens a mirrored copy from a cloud service instead. Another one automatically creates a Ulysses sheet with headers populated from the database fields (and it works on Mac and iOS with no modification thanks to Ulysses) - this would be easy to modify for Drafts.

Anyway yes it’s totally doable.

3

Sync… is something that I actually was failing to account for since the last time I actually looked at FM. Thanks for pointing that out, those difficulties might keep me from using it at all. I might have to make AirTable work with what I’m doing.

4

For me it came down to whether I really need to update the databases on iOS, & I decided I didn’t.

There do seem to be a couple of projects on Github which look promising for simple sync but I haven’t pursued them.

5

How do you create a link to a file on your Mac in FileMaker?

6

I was using it with BibDesk which has its own (mac-only) URL scheme for opening bibliographical references

7

Thanks. I am looking for a way to create a Drafts Action that would take the contents of my draft and put them into a field in FileMaker. Any suggestions of how I could do this? Thanks.