Getting Your Databases Ready for Custom Web Publishing

To get your FileMaker databases ready for Custom Web Publishing, you need to do a few specific things with access privileges in each file you want to share via Custom Web Publishing.

If you e familiar with previous versions of FileMaker Pro, youll recall that the various publishing options for a database (web sharing, local ODBC, remote ODBC) were all accessed via a files sharing options. Enabling or disabling a sharing method was simply a matter of checking or unchecking a sharing option.

Access to a FileMaker database via either XML or XSLT is handled via the security and privilege system. You can allow or deny XML or XSLT access to a file based on whether a user has the appropriate privilege, as well as controlling that users rights and privileges down to the record or field level.

Unfortunately, with this flexibility comes some additional work. To enable Custom Web Publishing in a file, you must enable the correct extended privileges for each type of CWP access you want to allow. To allow access to data from the file as raw XML, enable the extended privilege with the keyword fmxml. To allow access via XSLT, enable the extended privilege with the keyword fmxslt. Figure 23.2 illustrates the use of these extended privileges.

Figure 23.2. Youll need to enable certain extended privileges to enable Custom Web Publishing with XML and XSLT.

Note

In FileMaker 7, it was necessary to create these extended privileges by hand. In FileMaker 8, the set of default extended privileges is expanded to include these two privileges. They e off by default, but its no longer necessary to create them by hand.

Note

In versions of FileMaker Pro before version 7, web sharing in any of its forms could not be enabled or disabled while a database was being served by FileMaker Server. In FileMaker 7 and later, the extended privileges for CWP can be enabled or disabled on the fly.

To recap, each database that you want to share via CWP needs to have the appropriate extended privileges created and added to one or more privilege sets.

If you expect to see a database served via Custom Web Publishing and it doesn appear, check to make sure that the appropriate extended privileges are enabled. See the section on "Getting the Right Privileges" in the "Troubleshooting" section at the end of this chapter.