WebDirect: Early Days of FileMaker’s IWP replacement – Linear Chat

AH, THE EARLY DAYS. Sometimes one doesn’t look back on them nostalgically. Gwyn Jenkins of Linear Blue details the promise and pitfalls of WebDirect:

Having an appreciation as to what WebDirect is best suited to is critical. Viewing data, simple data entry and manipulation for remote users is where it thrives. Displaying product ranges as a catalogue, allowing clients to view their order status and capturing data submissions are prime examples of where WebDirect is a very useful tool. There are functions, notably printing, which is only possible via a browser [a pretty messy function to manage at the best of times] and exporting data which has output options that do not include .XLSX.

Printing is a problem for almost all web based solutions.  If FileMaker could offload that to the server and let the developer return a properly formatted pdf, that would be impressive.  I suspect it is not likely to happen anytime soon.

via WebDirect: Early Days for the IWP replacement … – Linear Chat.