A Beginner’s Guide to the FileMaker OData API
Last week at the Reconnect.Sydney 2023 Claris FileMaker developer conference I gave a presentation on getting started with the FileMaker OData API titled A Beginner’s Guide to the FileMaker OData API.
Thanks to everyone who attended my session and laughing at my jokes and hitting me up with some great questions.
If you would like to get a copy of my slides you can download a copy of my slide deck here.
There were a couple of questions/issues that were raised at the end of the Q&A period that I ran out of time to answer properly. Here’s some comments about those issues:
- there was a question about requesting cross joins of data from unrelated tables. I didn’t include a demo of this as my session was aimed at beginners getting going with OData, but you can get more information about this in the Claris FileMaker OData API Guide. The OData documentation on URL Conventions includes a section on Addressing the cross join of entity sets which goes into more detail.
- I demonstrated the behaviour when you attempt to edit/update a record using the primary key as the identifier and if no matching record is found a new record is created. This is documented in the OData spec as Upsert an Entity: “An upsert occurs when the client sends an update request to a valid URL that identifies a single entity that does not exist. In this case the service MUST handle the request as a create entity request or fail the request altogether.” It looks like the behaviour has changed from the first release of the OData API for FileMaker Server for Linux.
Leave a comment below if you have any questions about my presentation or OData generally.
Great presentation Andrew. Really enjoyed it.
Thanks Cath – congratulations on your excellent presentation as well. You’re definitely raising the bar for interface design and integrations with your Mobile Tyre Shop solution!
Great slide deck. I like OData for the simplicity of the JSON structure and no need for session tokens.