ISO FileMaker Magazine

Agentic coding has arrived, and there is no version of the future where it stays outside your FileMaker workflow, yet for most FileMaker developers it currently looks like a wall. Most every LLM ("agent") you can point at a project today works within a mental model of folders, plain text files, and version control, while everything you've built in FileMaker, your scripts, layouts, fields, and data, sits sealed inside a file that no model can simply open and inspect. This first video in the series takes that gap head on and shows why it exists, what it means for how your development process will evolve, and the groundwork you need before an agent can do anything useful with your solutions.

Watch as a dedicated project folder, a purpose-built internal FileMaker account, and a single markdown instruction file turn a general-purpose AI agent into one that can find your hosted solution, list every table it exposes, and execute scripts on request. You will see the hidden layers of your computer made visible, from the dot files that quietly govern each agent to the environment file that keeps credentials out of your version history, and you will watch the whole loop close when the agent connects through FileMaker's OData interface, reads the live structure of the solution, and runs a script without any manual plumbing. What used to mean hours of documentation and trial and error becomes a set of short, repeatable instructions that any agent you choose can follow.

This initial video establishes the connection, but the full series is where working with agents becomes a skill you can rely on. It continues with version control as the backbone of every project folder, reusable skills that extend what an agent can do, the quiet problem of drift as your solution outgrows the instructions you wrote for it, and the model and effort choices that decide how much you pay for the help you get. Taken together, the lessons turn agentic development from a novelty into a dependable part of how you build, test, and maintain FileMaker solutions.

If you have ever tried to bundle a hefty JavaScript library into a FileMaker solution, you already know the quiet frustration of it. You tuck the code into an insert text step or a custom function, you bump into arbitrary character limits, and you end up with the same content duplicated in places that were never really meant to hold it. The result works, but it always feels like a workaround rather than a home. FileMaker 26 finally addresses this head on, and it changes how you think about the assets your solution needs to keep close at hand.

In this tutorial you will watch an empty file go from nothing to fully stocked with reusable libraries stored directly inside the file itself, in a dedicated place that survives a full close and reopen. You will see how to organize your stored assets into named buckets and instance identifiers, how to sidestep the pasting limitations that have tripped up developers for years, and how to confirm that your content is genuinely persisted by reading it straight back out with the companion functions. What used to be a fragile ritual of copying, embedding, and hoping becomes a clean, repeatable pattern you can reason about.

You will explore versioning strategies for libraries that evolve over time, the difference between persisting to the file and loading into memory for speed, and the specific cases where you should reach for variables instead of persistent storage altogether. It also covers the performance realities of hosted files, the caching behavior between server and client, and a handful of environment quirks worth knowing before they slow you down. This is the practical, opinionated guidance that turns a new script step into a dependable part of your development toolkit.

If you've ever clicked a button in FileMaker that calls a web service and then watched the entire interface freeze while you wait, you already know the cost of synchronous communication. A two second delay is annoying, a thirty second delay is unacceptable, and a minute long response from a busy API can derail an entire workflow. This tutorial tackles the fundamental blocking problem head on and shows how to keep your users productive while requests run quietly in the background.

Watch the contrast unfold side by side as the native Insert from URL locks the screen during a five second delay while the same request through the MBS plugin fires off, returns control immediately, and lets you keep typing, navigating, and clicking through the solution. The technique hinges on a tag based routing system that lets every outbound call carry its own identifier, so when responses return at different times from different services, each one triggers exactly the right follow up script. You'll see how multiple parallel requests to completely different endpoints can be dispatched at once and handled independently as their replies arrive, transforming what was a serial bottleneck into a concurrent pipeline.

Watch while we walk through the entire custom function that wraps this behavior into a single reusable call. We'll take a deep dive on the headers hack required to work around a plugin limitation, the dual progress system that combines script driven updates with the plugin's own progress dialog, the finished script handler that releases cURL sessions from memory, the JWT token pattern for authenticated APIs, the user agent strategy for server side metrics, and the debugging variable approach that exposes every option the function sets. There is also context on local Docker based testing with HTTPbin so you can develop against a private endpoint before pointing at production, plus the reasoning behind dry coding constants and avoiding literal script names in code.

Struggling to make sense of a FileMaker database you inherited, or not sure how to structure a new one from scratch? Maybe, you're even trying to understand your very own file's schema. In this tutorial, we cut through the complexity by putting AI to work as your personal database architect. You'll learn how to think about your data the way the rest of the world does, understanding core concepts like entity relationships, normalization, and why FileMaker's unique "all or nothing" data model makes smart schema design more important than ever.

The real magic happens when we bring AI into the workflow. Watch how a simple, conversational prompt can take raw FileMaker table data and instantly return a clean, well-structured Entity Relationship Diagram complete with proper field types, naming conventions, and primary and foreign key relationships. What used to require deep database expertise and hours of planning can now be done in minutes, and the results are often better than what you'd come up with on your own.

The full video goes deeper into optimization strategies, consolidating redundant tables, planning migrations from existing solutions, and leveraging modern technologies alongside FileMaker to build faster, more scalable systems. If you're serious about leveling up your FileMaker development, this is the kind of practical, real-world training you won't find anywhere else.