About Custom Web Publishing

Custom Web Publishing is one of two technologies you can use to dynamically publish your FileMaker data on the World Wide Web. (The other is Instant Web Publishing, which you can read about in Chapter 21). Custom Web Publishing in FileMaker 7 replaces the technology that was known as CDML (Claris Dynamic Markup Language) in previous versions of FileMaker Pro.

One of the most significant advances in FileMaker Web publishing technologies is that, in FileMaker 7, it's possible to publish FileMaker data to the Web without using a copy of the FileMaker Pro client. In previous versions of the product, it was necessary to use FileMaker Unlimited, which was a specially enabled version of the client software. In the FileMaker 7 product line, the Web publishing technologies are built directly into the Server products and run as true standalone server-side processes.

NOTE

In FileMaker 7, it's still possible to use Instant Web Publishing to publish data from a client copy of FileMaker Pro. IWP can also be used in the server-only mode as well, though, and can support many more users in a server configuration.

NOTE

As you can read in more detail in Chapter 25, "FileMaker Server," the FileMaker Server product line has two different flavors, FileMaker Server and FileMaker Server Advanced. It's necessary to purchase FileMaker Server Advanced to gain the capability to do server-side Web publishing.

Server-side Web publishing works through an intermediate server called the Web Publishing Engine (which we'll call the WPE for short). The WPE is installed in a way that binds it to a Web server (Apache and Internet Information Server are the supported Web servers), and is able to make calls directly against a copy of FileMaker Server. Figure 23.1 shows the flow of a server-side CWP request (this flow actually applies to both Instant and Custom Web Publishing).

Figure 23.1. The Web Publishing Engine mediates between a Web server and a copy of FileMaker Server.

The WPE is responsible for accepting a request for FileMaker data that comes in over the Web and for relaying that request to a copy of FileMaker Server. The WPE then receives the server's response and (this is important!) converts the data into an XML format before sending it back.

The last part bears repeating, and is a significant break with the CDML technology that characterized previous versions of FileMaker: Custom Web Publishing in the FileMaker 7 product line is completely XML-based. Requests to the CWP engine can return either "raw" XML ”meaning that it's presented in one of FileMaker's built in XML grammars ”or they can return the results of an XSLT transformation applied to the XML. This leads to the possibility of transforming the XML into HTML, PDF, or any other text-based format before the data is returned to the client.

You can read about FileMakers XML grammars in "FileMaker's XML Grammars," p. 642 , and you'll learn more about them in the course of this chapter as well.