ISO FileMaker Magazine

In my opinion, before creating your first complex solution in FileMaker, it’s best to become familiar with the core features the environment provides. When considering how to structure your solutions — whether using a data separation model or a single file — it helps to understand how certain features can influence your decisions.

In this video, I cover the External Data Sources feature. While this feature is primarily intended for connecting to external data sources, its utility goes beyond simply linking to an ODBC or JDBC source and displaying SQL data alongside information stored within FileMaker.

For our simple launcher program, we use this feature to launch FileMaker solutions. This approach lets us store any number of solutions in a table and easily filter or locate the one we need to launch. By taking advantage of the various path options in the External Data Sources dialog, we gain insight into several benefits of how the feature works.