DropBox to FileMaker Part 1 – SeedCode

Are you integrating FileMaker with web services yet?

If not, get busy studying and learn, or risk getting left in other developers dust. The massive growth in web capabilities in recent years has resulted in a wealth of apps and services that have quickly become valuable tools for businesses and people all over the world.  Think Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, and more.  And of course, Dropbox.

Jason Young of Seedcode presented on linking Dropbox to FileMaker at Devcon 2015.  And he is sharing his hard earned knowledge with us all:

The original goal was to do a simple demo inserting a file stored on Dropbox into a FileMaker container field. This worked fine, but had a glaring practical limitation: the only URLs you can predict, and therefore program, are the ones in the Dropbox public folder. The download strings that Dropbox generates outside the public folder are, for all intents and purposes, random.

After a little research, I discovered that Dropbox had a relatively simple http API, and that through it you could get these download URLs. I also noticed there was a lot of other stuff the Dropbox API could do and decided to go a little deeper! How much could we do with Dropbox using the Insert From URL script step? Since Insert From URL works in FileMaker GO, I took the approach of building a mobile first app to test the question.

We’re happy to share the resulting demo file on our downloads page in the DevCon 2015 Demo Files section. The first thing you’ll need to do to play around with this file is to get it authorized.

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Jason has provided a downloadable free demo file, as well, at the link below.

So, FileMaker developers, start getting comfortable with terms like OAuth, API’s, Callbacks, and Access Tokens.  It’s the future, and it’s coming fast.

Source: FileMaker and OAuth: DropBox to FileMaker Part 1 – SeedCode

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